r^' 
 
ERNEST DOWSON 
 
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ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 1888-I897 
 
 REMINISCENCES, UNPUBLISHED LETTERS 
 AND MARGINALIA 
 
 BY 
 
 VICTOR PLARR 
 
 WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY COMPILED BY 
 H. GUY HARRISON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 LAURENCE J, GOMME 
 
 M CM XIV 
 
1>5 
 
 zn 
 
 "Already several of the so-called minor 
 poets of the time have won something like 
 the indisputableness of classics. Every 
 survey of recent poetry takes willing and 
 serious account of Francis Thompson, 
 Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John 
 Davidson ; and for greater reasons than 
 that these poets are no longer living." 
 
 From " The Eighteen Nineties," by Holbrook 
 Jackson, page 191 (Grant Richards Ltd., 
 1913)- 
 
 ivil?35ya 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 A Word of Explanation 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 9 
 
 Reminiscences . 
 
 
 
 
 II 
 
 DowsoN THE Docker 
 
 
 
 
 31 
 
 Marginalia 
 
 
 
 
 42 
 
 The Letters — I. 
 
 
 
 
 53 
 
 The Letters — IL 
 
 
 
 
 70 
 
 The Letters — III. 
 
 
 
 
 83 
 
 The Letters — IV. 
 
 
 
 
 . 96 
 
 The Crisis 
 
 
 
 
 lOI 
 
 DovvsoN in Brittany 
 
 
 
 
 106 
 
 The Last Phase 
 
 
 
 
 119 
 
 Bibliography 
 
 
 
 
 131 
 
 Index 
 
 
 
 
 143 
 
A WORD OF EXPLANATION 
 
 Poor Ernest Dowson through his sufferings is 
 becoming almost as famous as that earlier unhappy 
 poet who by self-destruction set apart his life- 
 story in the sorrowful annals of literature. There 
 were perhaps two Chattertons — ^who, at this long 
 distance of time, can tell ? There were certainly 
 two Dowsons — one the vexed and torn spirit of 
 the biographers, of Mr Sherard and Mr Arthur 
 Symons, the other a Dowson intime, known, I 
 venture to think, to very few, but by those few 
 greatly loved. 
 
 This intimate and perhaps essential Dowson 
 appears, I am convinced, in these thirty or so 
 letters, now for the first time published in full or 
 in part. In them no ugly slur of passion, no ill 
 savours, are to be found. Instead we are re- 
 freshed by fragrance — transient and slight, perhaps, 
 yet evident — by fragrance, be it said again, and by 
 an unfailing touch of good breeding, a gracious 
 and insistent air of modesty — by something 
 diffident, boyishly shy, often beautiful and noble. 
 ■ To me the re-reading of these letters of his 
 brings back my friend as I knew him and love to 
 9 
 
10 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 remember him — the gentleman, the kindly, charm- 
 ing boyish friend, the scholar, the exquisite poet. 
 I read and re-read through gathering tears, and 
 lay them down when I can see no more. 
 Frater, ave, atque vale ! 
 
ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 REMINISCENCES 
 
 It was early in the year 1888 that my old friend, 
 Mr Charles Sayle, that great introducer, first said 
 to me : " There's a man whom you ought to know, 
 a young poet just down from college, a man exactly 
 like J." — naming a well-known writer; "only, if 
 possible, more so ! " 
 
 Caesar and Pompey were very much alike, in 
 the opinion of the black man, especially Pompey. 
 And this was the case with Mr J. and Ernest 
 Dowson, the latter being the more alike — that is, 
 the more representative of the type. So possessed 
 was I with this parallelism that, like an eminent 
 bungling barrister in a law case full of names, who 
 addresses the defendant by the patronymic of his 
 dupe, I constantly transposed their surnames, and 
 for years confused and puzzled Ernest Dowson 
 by addressing him as J. I made somewhat the 
 same mistake again only yesterday. 
 
 We met in Mr Sayle's rooms, those quaint 
 picturesque rooms which were to be found in 
 Gray's Inn years ago, and have doubtless not been 
 obliterated in that ancient place. 
 II 
 
12 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 We were friends at once. The child that was 
 in both of us was our bond. A man may not 
 boast or be too egotistic : do not, therefore, accuse 
 me, courteous reader, of writing too much of 
 myself or of indulging in self-glorification when 
 I say that I rejoice for evermore at the thought 
 that the otherwise deterrent childish factor within 
 me has at different times opened to me the gate- 
 ways of the spirit. 
 
 We launched at once upon some tack of con- 
 versation about our disabilities. Peter Pan had 
 not been heard of, but we adumbrated him. 
 
 " Shall you ever feel old ? " 
 
 " No ; I am static — about four years of age." 
 
 " Like Victor Hugo at the age of eighty ! " 
 
 " It's a great drawback in applying for appoint- 
 ments. One must study the stodgy ! " 
 
 " Yes ; fancy a creature of four among old dry 
 gentlemen with long black legs, applying for a 
 secretaryship to a gas-works." 
 
 " It's a nightmare. I often have them. I find 
 myself put into parlous positions, and trying in 
 my dream to say — * The cumulative ratiocinations 
 of this objective evidence are calculated to divert 
 the attention of the party of immutability in 
 inverse proportion to the corroborative dogmatism 
 of the prior deponent. The issue, indeed, could 
 not be more luminously stated.' I'm only four 
 years old, and it's rather a strain." 
 
 " Yes, yes ! Wlien I transact serious business — 
 and I do all day — I view myself from the outside 
 
REMINISCENCES 13 
 
 as something strange and aw^ful. They refer to 
 me in reports without a blush as * our plodding 
 
 friend, Mr / Ye gods, I haven't the pleasure 
 
 of the gentleman's acquaintance. Were it possible 
 to talk as you do in nightmares one would be very 
 eminent in a year's time. One would be a big 
 barrister or in Parliament." 
 
 "No, one would write for The Times and have 
 a masterly grasp — of bimetallism, say. D'you 
 know that at the age of seventeen, in the Sixth Form 
 of a Public School, I put important leading articles 
 aside as I should put Sanscrit or classical German 
 aside ? Couldn't understand a sentence ! " 
 
 " Numbers of people, I fancy, regard poetry in 
 the same light all their lives." 
 
 We cited old forgotten authors, to whom one 
 dares not now refer without a blush, or to whom 
 one adverts desperately by way of paradox, the 
 kind of paradox in which the elderly are indulged 
 because they are known to have suffered some 
 disappointments . 
 
 Shall I say that, at that early date in our 
 acquaintance, Loti was one of these forgotten ? 
 Dowson first spoke of Loti, and I have a dim 
 inkling of a recollection that he spoke also of 
 Plato, in at least one of whose immortal dialogues 
 he rejoiced and had probably been ''ploughed" 
 during his mysterious sojourn at Queen's 
 College, Oxford. 
 
 We saw much of one another from this time 
 forward. He was singularly fresh, young, eager. 
 
L 
 
 14 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 sympathetic, his charming face unscathed by any 
 serious sorrows or dissipations. 
 
 There followed, in his career, a strange period 
 of rowdiness — I can use no other word — of the 
 undergraduate type — that is to say, it was quaint 
 and boyish. 
 
 I occupied the most uncomfortable rooms in the 
 world in Great Russell Street, and often, late at 
 night, Dowson crept into the house and begged a 
 bed. I was so selfish as to suggest a sofa, and on a 
 horrible horsehair sofa, or on the floor, in a blatant 
 parlour, he often slept, under such blankets as 
 could be found. He seems to have kept this 
 custom up, for Mr Edgar Jepson, in an admir- 
 able account of him, published in The Academy 
 in 1906, says that Ernest Dowson often slept in 
 his arm-chair. It was an unwise custom at 
 best, but we did not suspect the frailty of his 
 health. 
 
 Ordinarily a Rechabite in those days, I had 
 
 nothing to offer him but water at an hour after mid- 
 
 , night . He drank his tumbler of water, and remarked 
 
 good-humouredlj/ :^'' This reminds me of Milton," 
 
 who always drank a glass of water after supper. 
 
 A legend has arisen of an inebriate Ernest 
 Dowson. It has been generated chiefly in the two 
 closely allied consciences of Amercia and of Biitish 
 Nonconformity. Personally, in eight 3/ears or so, 
 I remember only a trifling aberration from the 
 path of temperance, when he leant, smiling medi- 
 tatively, against a lamp-post, exactly where the 
 
REMINISCENCES 15 
 
 Irving statue now stands. He manifestly re- 
 quired support. 
 
 A lady, who had been mercifully blind to his 
 condition, was being shown into a cab, and I shall 
 never forget — I see the scene now vividly — how 
 he leapt from his dream — he had been standing 
 storklike, one leg crossed over the other — and 
 presented the lady, or the cabby, with her fare. 
 It was done in a flash of lightning, with a dreamy 
 delicacy quite incomparable. She is dead of con- 
 sumption, poor thing, so this trifling reminiscence 
 hurts no one ! He took out a florin and I wcn- 
 dered at the time that he had so much money in 
 his pocket. Everybody is, in these pallid days, 
 called *' drunk " if he is ever so little elated, but 
 when I was a small boy, in St Andrews in Fifeshire, 
 only those were called drunk who lay in the gutter 
 on their backs. Surely some middle way of 
 speech might be discovered between these two 
 extremes. 
 
 L Sometimes, with other merry revellers, he 
 arrived in the street outside my rooms, and bawled 
 my name, in chorus with his friends, for many 
 minutes. The long and dreary street must have 
 become aware of my existence, and, in my most 
 uncomfortable bed, I reflected at the time that 
 never yet had an ancient patronymic figured in 
 such wise ! 
 
 These friends — let the Muse of History descend 
 and unbend — called themselves " Bingers," and 
 to " binge " was to behave and to potate most 
 
/ 
 
 i6 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 eccentrically. The Benson Company are said still 
 to understand the word. 
 
 Those were scapegrace days — and some amusing 
 traditions could be related concerning them — but, 
 Lord ! as Mr Pepys would have said, they w^ere 
 nothing more. At all times they were far, very 
 far, from the depth of lurid dissipation that is 
 being allowed to cover the poet's good fame, unless 
 it be rescued betimes. 
 
 And Mr Jepson's kindly apology for his glass of 
 absinthe before dinner was not really necessary in 
 1906, seeing that Dowson was an amateur of m^any 
 good plebeian French customs, among which the 
 apperitif — often consisting of absinthe — is one. 
 Englishmen dislike this poison, which they liken 
 to paregoric, a mysterious mixture not known to 
 Continentals, or to Ernest Dowson. 
 
 His short career, indeed, may be said to divide 
 itself into three periods, of which the second alone 
 really concerns us, for it is the finest. In the first 
 period, which lasted from 1888, or a little earlier, 
 to 1891 or thereabouts, the poet was after all only 
 in his green salad days, just as any other normal 
 youth might be. Nor would it be necessary to 
 allude to them save for the emergence of a miracle 
 — the miracle of poetry. For all the while that 
 Ernest Dowson ran foolishly and noisily about 
 London, sleeping on sofas, consorting with the last 
 of the Bob Sawyers, and proving on the whole 
 agreeably unwise, his muse was fluttering into life. 
 
 Suddenly, we were all, as it were, startled by a 
 
REMINISCENCES 17 
 
 perfect poem from his pen. We had not, so to 
 speak, expected it of the pleasant youth, who 
 played billiards punctually at six o'clock every 
 evening and smoked rather vile Vevey cigars ! 
 
 The poets have often presented this paradox. 
 Thus the young Shakespeare meditated " Venus 
 and Adonis " among the deer-stealers, and Byron, 
 the dandy, wooed the muse in the intervals of the 
 deals at Almack's. It is a truism to say that 
 poetry will out even in the most adverse circum- 
 stances, and perhaps because of them. How 
 many of our bards, for instance, have been 
 tempered after passing through the purifying fires 
 of an English public school, w^here to be a poet is to 
 rank vilely with pale young martyrs who say their 
 prayers, " swots " who conscientiously do their 
 lessons. Radicals, fat-eaters, and other pariahs 
 hateful to the soul of Boy ! 
 
 Dowson had escaped the public school Hinnom- 
 fires, and at Oxford, where poetry is an honoured 
 tradition, he can surely not have suffered, but his 
 early associations in London were in piquant 
 contrast to his genius. Most of his friends cannot 
 have dreamt that he was a poet at all. 
 
 Perhaps this is as it should be. What chance, 
 after all, had young M. de Lamartine, whose 
 adoring family helped him to shut himself up in his 
 bedroom and to fast while composing poetry in his 
 teens ? I am French enough by race, and old- 
 fashioned enough, to adore the orthodox romantics, 
 but often, in reading them, I wonder whether they 
 
i8 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 would have survived the kicks, and almost the 
 obloquy, which must, at some time or other, and 
 in varying degrees, have been the portion of the 
 schoolboy Shelleys, Cloughs, Matthew Arnolds, 
 and Lionel Johnsons. 
 
 And here is yet another paradox. Whence have 
 we the gift of poetry in any generation ? From 
 whom in the past does this divine essence distil ? 
 What accounts for that Latin Ernest Dowson, that 
 belated counterpart of Catullus, Propertius and 
 the rest. 
 
 Many of us knew Ernest Dowson 's father, a 
 remarkable man, a wit, the friend of half the 
 interesting artists and men of letters of his genera- 
 tion, the relative of Browning's ^ " Waring," one 
 holding the full and true tradition of Elizabeth 
 Barrett Browning through the Barretts, and, 
 through his friendship with Severn, of John 
 Keats. But this elder Mr Dowson did not account 
 for a Catullus, nor did Ernest Dowson 's mother, 
 accomplished and intellectual as that lady was. 
 
 It is true that the poet was wont to shake his 
 
 head gloomily over a print or pencil sketch of an 
 
 ancestor engaged in theatricals, on a queer stage 
 
 with spindling Corinthian columns, in the period 
 
 of George IV. ! But at most that ancestor can 
 
 only have accounted for the Vevey cigars and the 
 
 vie de Bohhne. Whence — from what older stock 
 
 — came *' Amor Umbratilis," and " Supreme 
 
 Unction," and that glorious poem which bursts 
 
 forth in one of these letters ? 
 
 ^ One of Robert Browning's early letters is addressed 
 to a Dowson. 
 
REMINISCENCES 19 
 
 " Amor Umbratilis," was one of the first poems 
 that attracted much attention. It was pubHshed, 
 if I remember rightly, by Mr Herbert Home in 
 The Century Guild Hobby Horse together with a 
 batch of the poet's other most noteworthy verses. 
 The MS. of it, in pencil, lies before me now, 
 inscribed on the back of a fierce letter referring to 
 the poet's Oxford bills, which, he told me, he had 
 agreed to pay by degrees. " You have not 
 returned this promissory note as arranged — please ^ 
 do so at once." And Ernest Dowson has immor-''^^ 
 talised this gruffness with one of the loveliest 
 elegies in the language ! One wonders if he chose 
 his scrap of paper of set purpose. The solicitor's 
 date on it is October 7, 1890. He sent me, and 
 I believe others of his friends, numbers of MS. 
 poems. I have thirteen of his best — all, in fact, 
 except the now famous *' Cynara." One is written , . 
 on the back of a letter from a stockbroker : " I ' 
 have advised you a good many times to join the 
 
 * S Syndicate,' and you might have got the 
 
 shares at one pound each, but you have let the 
 chance slip through your fingers and the price is 
 now three pounds." 
 
 To think what a chance our poet missed ! The 
 letters are reproving and rather uncivil, but a law 
 of libel, designed in a democratic age to protect 
 queer fish from being caught, prevents me from 
 printing the writers' names. Perhaps, however, 
 I ought to do so in the interests of historic truth 
 and to advertise their respective firms. 
 
A 
 
 20 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 The poet told me that he adored gambling, but 
 I have no evidence that he gambled. He loved 
 excitement, as all true artists do, and gambling 
 is one of the attainable excitements. " II faut etre 
 toujour s un feu ivre," he was fond of quoting from 
 Baudelaire, and he frequently complained that a 
 long bout of early to bed and early to rise, combined 
 with reasonable diet, etc., knocked him up, as 
 Lord B3n:on would have said, damnably. 
 
 I am hastening to the poet's second period, the 
 worthiest one, but the first detains me at every 
 turn. We smiled at him then. He was a dear, 
 queer fellow ! He said to me once that he rather 
 disliked " humour," and yet he was half con- 
 sciously humorous always. His education before 
 the Oxford period, itself a " veiled period," to 
 quote Borrow's phrase, was wrapped in mystery. 
 His childhood, he tells us, in a marginal note — 
 I shall refer to these later — was pagan. " All 
 these fluctuations and agonies of a hypersensitive, 
 morbid childhood with Hebraic traditions are to 
 [mel incomprehensible," he writes. " My child- 
 hood was pagan." As to natural religion, which 
 belongs to childhood, it was " a phase, which at 
 no time of my life have I ever undergone or under- 
 stood." 
 
 A truly charming pastel of his little wistful ideal 
 face at the age of four, by the late W. G. Wills, 
 hung over the mantelpiece of his family's drawing- 
 room in their house at Forest Row in 1888-1890. 
 The young expression was unforgettable, and this 
 
REMINISCENCES 21 
 
 is perhaps the only portrait of Ernest Dowson that 
 remains, or has been extant, besides Mr WilHam 
 Rothenstein's sketch and the reproduction of a 
 photograph of him in a Queen's College " blazer," 
 prefixed to his " Collected Poems." At the time 
 of writing this Dr Greene tells me that he once 
 asked Ernest Dowson to lunch to meet the famous 
 Mr Sargent, but the painter was apparently 
 unimpressed by his possible sitter. 
 
 He received no regular education, unless we 
 count his one half -mythic year at college. He 
 had learnt Latin from an Italian priest in a 
 mountain village in Italy — possibly Senta, a place 
 beloved by him. At least this is the tradition as 
 it came to me from him. In many ways he was 
 surprisingly and refreshingly ignorant. Quite 
 gravely once he averred to me that he supposed the 
 Red Indians in the United States greatly out- 
 numbered the white men, and that he hoped the 
 natives in their war-paint would soon march on 
 New York, destroy it, and thus break the back of 
 transatlantic civilisation ! Yet he was the friend 
 of some charming Americans, and perhaps his 
 truest admirers are in the States. 
 
 Of modem science, like most of his literary y^ 
 generation, he knew nothing at all, nor of history, 
 and he commented wonderingly upon another's 
 habit of always reading it. He envied a poet 
 whose objective vignettes of periods and peoples 
 struck him as a tapestry. " It is always that power 
 of weaving tapestries that I envy and admire | " 
 
22 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 I am setting down my recollections of him at 
 random, and before I forget them, and there is no 
 need to be systematic in a labour of love. In 
 English politics he was vague. The still mighty 
 voice of Gladstone appealed to him not at all. 
 He disregarded the Irish Question — all questions 
 of the day. Philanthropy and socialism bored 
 him. Like Lionel Johnson he was interested in 
 the White Rose League, and told me that he had 
 been solemnly presented to the authentic descend- 
 ant and last representative of the Stuarts — not, 
 by the bye, the Duke of Buccleugh, but a solemn 
 lady with her grey hair down her back, who stood, 
 pathetically enough, in the upper chamber of a 
 small restaurant in Soho, where the restaurateur 
 and his wife acted as her chamberlains. The lady 
 strongly resembled Charles L, he averred. From 
 the French point of view he became a Boulangist 
 — some well-known actress had just done so, who 
 knew about as much of politics as her pet lemur — 
 not because he knew anything of French affairs 
 or history either, but because he wished to be 
 " agin the government." ^ To him Paris was a city 
 full of decadents, topped by Verlaine. Quite the 
 feeblest things he has written, in my humble opinion, 
 are his imitations of that errant genius. Indeed, 
 Verlaine, and a certain parasite on the genius of 
 others, who is dead, and shall be nameless, were, 
 in great measure, his per vert ers. One had, in the 
 late eighties and early nineties, to be preposter- 
 ously French, and to spectators of this psycho- 
 
REMINISCENCES 23 
 
 logical aberration, especially to genuine French 
 spectators, whose earliest recollections were a 
 darkling sky streaked with the bomb-trails of 
 a Night of Terror in 1870, the sight of young 
 Englishmen discovering an unworthy side of 
 France would have been disgusting had it not 
 been mainly comic] 
 
 Stray Gauls used to be imported to grace 
 literary circles here. I remember one such — a 
 rare instance of a rough Frenchman — ^to whom 
 Dowson was devoted. When a Gaul appeared in 
 a coterie we were either silent, like the schoolgirls 
 in their French conversation hour, or we talked a 
 weird un-French French like the ladies in some of 
 Du Maurier's drawings. 
 
 " Ey-ce-quer voo connoissay leys peyntoors de 
 Burne- Jones, Mossoo Dubwaw ? " 
 
 Poor Oscar Wilde, I particularly noted, dis- 
 tinguished himself in the rich old fearless French 
 of Stratford-atte-Bowe. Hence I venture to 
 disagree with the great Monsieur Andre Gide, who 
 said " he had scarcely any accent, at least only 
 what it pleased him to affect when it might give 
 a somewhat new or strange appearance to a word 
 — for instance, he used purposely to pronounce 
 scepticisme as skepticisme." This he did, I will 
 swear, because he was a Greek scholar, a colla- 
 borator with Professor Mahaffy, and for no other 
 reason. 
 
 But let not any Frenchman who may chance to 
 read this passage begin to crow over us ! With 
 
24 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 the solitary exception of my father's old friend, 
 Adolphe Wurtz, the great chemist, who was an 
 Alsatian, no Frenchman whom I have met has ever 
 - spoken English otherwise than as a Frenchman, 
 prettily enough, it is true. M. Wurtz spoke 
 English perfectly. Born bilinguals are few and 
 far between. The one I know best speaks neither 
 language with absolute correctness. 
 
 Dowson's own French was dim, but his admira- 
 tion of France shone out, and puts him among the 
 virtual pioneers of the Entente Cordiale. 
 
 He was singularly well read in French literature, 
 a curious and indefatigable student of that wide 
 source of culture. With Balzac he was entirely 
 conversant, and he perused Stendhal diligently 
 and with often repeated admiration. Few have 
 followed Dowson so far. He rejoiced in Chamfort, 
 but his ideas on the French revolutionary epoch 
 were confined to this — that the aristocrats died 
 like great gentlemen, and the opinion was fortified 
 for him, in my presence, by a famous aesthetic 
 friend, who told him that they always went to 
 their deaths wearing white satin clothes and with 
 red roses in their coat lapels ! There was evidently 
 some confusion here with what is recorded of Lord 
 Ferrers, in his wedding-dress, or Montrose in his 
 " fine scarlet." Of his love of Loti's work I have 
 spoken, and he introduced me, at an early date, 
 to the prose poems of Baudelaire, which he has 
 y imitated, rather tragically, in " Decorations." 
 " Les Yeux des Pauvres," which describes the 
 
REMINISCENCES 25 
 
 wondering, half-mystical look in the eyes of poor 
 people gazing into the window of a restaurant, 
 arrested his attention to the last degree. 
 
 In England's literary history and literature he 
 was widely read, too, and of the Americans he 
 most admired Hawthorne and Henry James and, 
 I think, Bret Harte. 
 
 To be such a shining stylist as he proved himself 
 he certainly must have ranged through the finest 
 masterpieces. There can be no doubt of that. 
 His gift of style allures, perhaps, the most in his 
 cameo-like verse. In the prose, on which he set 
 extreme value, there is sometimes an apparent 
 touch of labour and preciosity. There are petulant 
 Gallicisms, for instance, set down with delibera- 
 tion. He was fond of quoting Flaubert — was it 
 Flaubert ? — who sat long in meditation in front 
 of a blackboard with alternative words chalked 
 thereon. Dowson would have had me believe that 
 he, too, pondered the mot juste for hours. It 
 was impossible to point out to him that English 
 has two and a half vocabularies and French only 
 one, for he disliked anything in the nature of 
 common knowledge, and had all the modern 
 horror of being thought well-informed or of 
 acquiring information. Yet he rarely insulted 
 one's time-honoured susceptibilities by talking 
 of this or that being bourgeois, and, though, like 
 many of his type, he tried not to believe what was 
 unpalatable to him, he was too good-natured not 
 to be really catholic in taste. 
 
26 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 The blackboard, which in England we then 
 snobbishly associated with primary education to 
 such an extent that we laboriously did without it 
 in the universities, and the mot juste, which is an 
 exotic too, were part of a general system of things 
 French, of which at times he was an almost excited 
 apostle. Thus he constantly insisted that the 
 rime riche is a beauty in poetry. A brutal 
 Philistine pointing out to him that the rime riche 
 is a bore in French and an imbecility in English 
 versification, he so far acquiesced as seldom to use 
 it. In common with Lionel Johnson he found an 
 ^ occult virtue in the Alexandrine, but again did not 
 press his admiration to the point of using it 
 overmuch. That he employed it with grand 
 effect on occasion — when a long line is necessary — 
 I do not deny. 
 
 His charm was such that one agreed tacitly to 
 disagree about a host of subjects. And then, too, 
 there was always the saving common ground, 
 between several of us, of love of beauty and of a 
 fine style and serious art. He felt many things 
 deeply, and it is a truism to say that he achieved 
 supremely good work. As a thoughtful critic he 
 was not as those who frighten scholarly lovers of 
 the pageantry of Time into silence by their sneers 
 at all that happened more than a week ago, yet 
 give you nothing — nothing — to take its place. 
 Nor, feeling deeply as he did, was he of those who 
 at bottom have no feeling, though babbling per- 
 petually of culture — those " who swallow their 
 
REMINISCENCES 27 
 
 opinions in platoons," and when you ask them 
 what they think of this or that, or so-and-so, seem 
 to listen and perpend as though waiting for a 
 guiding spirit voice from the head of their coterie, 
 their suburb, or their favourite review. 
 
 I confess, though, that in defending the obvious 
 one was not so bold with him as with Lionel John- 
 son, a dear friend of both of us. Johnson was a very 
 full man, Ernest Dowson a good-humoured eclectic, 
 with his patches of cultivation and deserts between. 
 
 The passion for things French, for the South, 
 may perhaps have come to Dowson from his early 
 wanderings out of England. There was a certain 
 originality in this passion, which belies mere 
 affectation. And the charm and the genius of the 
 man depend greatly on this originality, which was 
 for years increasingly at death-grips with squadrons 
 of affectations. Sometimes these bore him down. 
 
 They began, perhaps, by his profession of a 
 grand passion for Wagner's operas, but a Philistine 
 friend of his was so wicked as to surmise that he 
 valued the music because he was taken to hear it 
 by a fashionable man-about-town. He dressed to 
 go to these concerts, yet of evening dress he had 
 a quite old-fashioned Bohemian horror. 
 
 As his reputation increased he was taken up by 
 numbers of brilliant quidnuncs, and some of his 
 faithful friends suffered pangs of jealousy, like poor 
 little Frederika, deserted by Goethe, when he 
 could not sup with them because he was going to 
 sup, less comfortably perhaps, with young Mr and 
 
28 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 Mrs So-and-So, people who had only just heard of 
 him. Of course he excused himself by expressing 
 intense admiration for young Mr So-and-So 's 
 little book ! A telegram came one day from the 
 Oscar Wilde entourage, peremptorily ordering 
 him to appear at the Cafe Royal to lunch with 
 the then great man. His excitement was marked : 
 he was flattered and fluttered, though a Philistine 
 friend suggested that a reply should be sent urging 
 the great paradox-monger to go to a warm place 
 or to take lessons in ordinary social formalities. 
 
 Young Mr Ezra Pound, to whom Dowson is a 
 kind of classical myth, just as the ancients are a 
 m5^h to us all, tells me a story, told him in turn by 
 a good recorder, of how Dowson went to see poor 
 Wilde in Dieppe after the debacle, and how he 
 endeavoured to reform his morality by diverting 
 it at least into a natural channel. It is at best a 
 smoking-room anecdote, not fit for exact repeti- 
 tion. I suppose they drank absinthe together in a 
 big tawdry noisy cafe near that queer odoriferous 
 ,j> ^ j fish-market, where they sell all the monsters of the 
 :>* 'i sea which English fishermen reject. 
 
 * Here, for Dowson 's sake, entire frankness is 
 necessary. During the eight or nine years of our 
 friendship, he told me often — perhaps repeatedly 
 — ^that he simply could not understand the 
 *' invert " point of view. It did not appeal to him 
 in the least. Honesty bids me put this defini- 
 tively on record in these late mjrthopoeic days. 
 And therewith I desire to drop the subject. 
 
 X 
 
REMINISCENCES 29 
 
 But his wish to go and visit poor Wilde was on 
 a par with much else in his last phase. When he 
 went to Dieppe, he was evidently following the 
 trend of his mind. He had fallen on evil days — 
 felt, probably, the approach of the end — was over- 
 shadowed, poor dear fellow, by domestic tragedy, 
 personal chagrin and disillusionment, financial 
 worry and the rest. Moreover, through the irony 
 of Fate, he was himself becoming a fashionable 
 writer, his pen much sought after by the shrewd 
 and the parasitic. He had to do something that 
 would keep him " in the movement," that delusion ^^ 
 of most of us. At the same time he may have felt 
 that a man whose heart the Fates had broken may 
 well show sympathy with another who has 
 deliberately broken his own heart. So he went to 
 Dieppe, probably with a mixture of motives, to 
 pay his call, to figure with his broken heart. 
 
 As poets should, he certainly loved flattery, and 
 was prodigal of it to those he loved, but there was 
 a time — and this came in the midst of all his 
 troubles — when it threatened his equilibrium as 
 an artist. 
 
 I may seem to have written these last few pages 
 with some appearance of morgue, but I really 
 write in sorrow rather than in any spirit of bitter- 
 ness — in affectionate sorrow and with infinite 
 regret. 
 
 Ernest Dowson is numbered by Mr Holbrook 
 Jackson, in his admirable if somewhat mytho- 
 poetical record of the " Eighteen Nineties," 
 
30 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 among the interesting band, including Wilde, 
 Beardsley, and Johnson, who joined the Church 
 of Rome in what we now consider the period of 
 " the Decadence." 
 
 Lionel Johnson, at least, could give chapter and 
 verse for his conversion. Hardly so Dowson. 
 I shall never forget the day of his admittance to 
 the Church. He came to me rather excitedly, and 
 yet shook hands with weak indecision . His hesitat- 
 ing hand-shake, alas ! always betrayed a sorrowful 
 fatigue. 
 
 " I have been admitted," he said, but he 
 seemed disappointed, for the heavens had not 
 fallen, nor had a sign been vouchsafed. The 
 priest who had admitted him had done so quite 
 casually and had seemed bored. Afterwards, it 
 seemed to me, he forgot all about his religion with 
 surprising alacrity. Only his poetry bears witness 
 to his romantic admiration of a creed, which, 
 after all, he shares with many Protestants and 
 Agnostics. ^ 
 
 Respecting sincere Catholics ^ as I do, I was 
 keenly annoyed with his conversion — with this 
 kind of conversion. It was comparable to the way 
 in which our clever young men to-day, with no 
 knowledge of biology, folk-lore or the rationale of 
 English constitutional history, become socialists. 
 But I held my tongue. Our literary life is a long 
 reticence at best. , 
 
 ^ I trust the poet's Catholic friends, who are also my 
 friends, will forgive me for stating the case as it struck me. 
 
DOWSON THE DOCKER 
 
 A TEDIOUS commonplace of conversation, derived 
 from journalism, is to the effect that letter-writing 
 is a vanished art. People have no leisure : they 
 live in a rush. Yet it would, perhaps, be more 
 true to say that the average Englishman, even in 
 the days of the Grays and the Horace Walpoles, 
 was never a letter-writer. His native pride, his 
 innate reticence, restrain him. How many of us 
 are acquainted vv^ith clever people whose curt 
 missives are as deadly dull, as little illustrative 
 of the truth that is in them, as the inscriptions on 
 Scottish tombstones, or on poor Ernest Dowson's 
 tombstone, which I think I saw one day when 
 attending the funeral of that literary and scientific 
 giant, the late Sir John Simon ? 
 
 Ernest Dowson enjoyed much leisure. And, 
 at all times, he abhorred rush, a phrase which is 
 ordinarily our excuse for not bearing in mind the 
 close ties of clan, family and friendship. He loved 
 to write a letter, probably as a relief to the excite- 
 ment of literary composition. It may be he wrote 
 thousands of letters in his time, all so exquisitely 
 phrased as to suggest affectation. His last letter 
 to me, with a touch of heart-break in it, is better 
 written than any of the rest. 
 
 31 
 
32 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 His was a beautiful handwriting, the clear 
 script of a poet with a sense of form, who has 
 learnt to write Greek, has learnt free-hand drawing, 
 has engaged in clerkly avocations, and sets a 
 proper value on what he writes. Shelley, with his 
 exquisite script, was one such. Also Alexander 
 Pope. Pope's fascinating simple notes to those he 
 loved lie before me in MS. as I write this perhaps 
 rather conventional essay on handwriting. Poor 
 crooked Pgpe, poor unhappy Ernest Dowson ! 
 ; Once, in ; his delightful old dock-house j(/)ac^ all 
 ' the critics and official biographers) , I surprised him 
 inditing exquisitely, and in a sort of court-hand, 
 a huge bill addressed to some shipowner. The 
 document was a large quarto sheet, and there were 
 fascinating items to this effect : 
 
 To caulking 
 
 £50 
 
 
 
 To scraping off barnacles . 
 
 £25 
 
 
 
 To re-painting 
 
 £48 10 
 
 
 
 To mending pumps, captain's dog's 
 
 
 
 kennel, and supplying buckets 
 
 £23 17 
 
 3i 
 
 The total was a fat, formidable, comfortable 
 amount. It totalled, I remember, something not 
 far short of £158. 
 
 To my merely bourgeois mind this appeared a 
 desirable sum, and as I looked over the shoulder 
 of my poetical friend I could not help marvelling 
 that he wrote this sort of thing as one to the 
 manner born. 
 
DOWSON THE DOCKER 33 
 
 " What a delight it is to be a docker," I said, very 
 humbly, " and who would have thought of you as 
 inditing these fat lucrative bills ? " 
 
 He wriggled his shoulders, and smiled his in- 
 scrutable smile, the smile of a man who ponders. 
 He certainly made out the account as though he 
 loved it and knew his work thoroughly. 
 
 Despite this evidence of an amiable interest 
 in shipowners, Ernest Dowson and his father 
 explained that they did not like them, as these 
 had now formed a habit, mainly accounted for 
 by the then imminent decadence of the Port of 
 London, of " lying off " in mid-Thames instead of 
 " coming into dock " in the time-honoured manner. 
 And this relieved my apprehensions, for, in those 
 days, if I may wax biographical on my own account, 
 I had been unlucky enough to become entangled 
 in ultra-democratic journalism and to have attained 
 a vivid insight into the ethics of labour leaders and 
 trade unions, which will last me for the remainder 
 of my pilgrimage in this vale of tears. Our 
 venture in fools' journalism — the later develop- 
 ments of which were forced upon us — cost my 
 father and myself a large slice of our small capital 
 — it is often the fate of the honest gentleman to 
 pay for the quarrels of labour with the more or less 
 imaginary vampires of Mammon — but, for the 
 moment, I was supposed to be fighting against 
 shipowners, who, in those days, not so long after 
 Plimsoll's time, by the by, were probably often 
 not all that they should be. Hence, I was afraid 
 
34 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 that I might appear a Larkinian of that day to 
 the Dowsons, father and son. They, however, 
 reassured me. 
 
 By persons of less than bourgeois descent, by 
 persons who are ashamed of their origin, we hear 
 much abuse of the bourgeoisie. Mr Bernard Shaw 
 brings the idea over from the France of 1848. The 
 ouvriers of 1830, 1848 and 1871 were writhing 
 under the heel of fat and vulgar epiciers, very vile 
 and grasping people, such as sit at the receipt of 
 custom in Continental hotels to-day. 
 
 But the Dowsons, father and son, perfectly 
 well-bred, exquisitely polished, genteel in the good 
 old sense of a word which it has been in the interest 
 of many to suppress, were of the type of Victor 
 Hugo's old gentleman, the grandfather of Marius 
 in "Les Miserables," "qui portait sa bourgeoisie 
 comme un marquisat." The type still abounds in 
 provincial France to-day. 
 
 \ Ernest Dowson appreciated the ancestral trade 
 half humorously. Mr Arthur Symons need not 
 have pitied him for being a docker in those early 
 artless days. 
 
 We went out and looked at a jolly ship in the 
 little dry dock, which was two hundred and eighty- 
 seven feet long by eighty wide ; the depth of water 
 *' on a two foot six inch block at neap tides " being 
 two fathoms. 
 
 Dowson the decadent, the dreamer, the example 
 of all that was terrible at the end of the nineteenth 
 century, cut across a plank and was aboard before 
 
DOWSON THE DOCKER 35 
 
 I could say Jack Robinson. In a second he 
 looked out at me from a forward porthole, and 
 explained condescendingly, but with excitement 
 and interest in his voice : 
 
 ** This is the front ■psiit of the ship/' 
 
 " Of course," I replied. 
 
 I see his rather pale face even now, framed in 
 the dark porthole, which he would have called a 
 window. 
 
 He had not the lank hair of the typical poet, 
 and his face was not the long one of the bards. 
 His hair, a dark brown, was curly and wavy, and 
 his eyes and face, in those days, without being 
 beautiful, were agreeable and animated. He had 
 only the remotest resemblance to Keats : he was 
 quite individual. His dress, too, was peculiar to 
 him. He wore, I fancy, what was then called a 
 pea-jacket, dark trousers the worse for wear, and 
 boots that arrested the attention by a certain 
 quaintness. His collars were of the stick-up kind, 
 not high, and I distinctly remember that he 
 turned down one corner more than the other, and 
 that the collar as a whole, like the boots, seemed 
 moulded into folds of a sympathetic irregularity. 
 He probably sported a black butterfly necktie, 
 which he delighted in as being French. It was of 
 the kind which you can buy for forty-five centimes 
 or so, and it was fastened by a thin piece of elastic 
 and a boot button. 
 
 I walked along the side of the dock, and with 
 incredible speed, as of a lapwing, he was at the 
 
/ 
 
 36 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 stern, and looking out of another aperture in the 
 dark tarry timbers he cried : 
 
 *' And this is the back part of the ship." 
 
 He visited other parts of the vessel, and illumin- 
 ated me on their uses as before . Then , rejoining me, 
 he confessed ingenuously: "Though I'm always 
 here, I've never learnt the proper names for 
 things." 
 
 ** Not to indulge in technicalities is the hall- 
 mark of culture," I remarked sententiously. 
 Sententiousness used to please him in those early 
 days, and it was only later on, when fatigue became 
 his element, that he began to dismiss any laborious 
 sally with a weary nod of abstract acquiescence. 
 
 " My little brother," he said, " brings parties 
 of boys from the Forest to play on the ships." 
 
 How one envied them. 
 
 I came away from " the dock " delighted. It 
 was all so jolly. That contact with reality — even 
 if they are unconscious of it — is so good for poets. 
 They should smell tar and hay ; they should 
 rejoice in the open air, in things, in sport ! 
 
 I sat down and wrote a Globe " Turnover," 
 mainly in praise of this dock of Dowson's (21st May 
 1889). The "Turnover" was a great institution 
 in those days. There were said to be three 
 hundred and ten briefless barristers in the Temple 
 all busy writing them. 
 
 *' There are old-world offices in existence in 
 London even now which breathe a placid atmo- 
 
DOWSON THE DOCKER 37 
 
 sphere not to be matched among the turmoil of 
 the outer world. 
 
 " There are offices among the docks, on the shore 
 of murky Thames, which should be full of inspira- 
 tion to some at least of their inmates. Wliere the 
 great lock-gates divide the dripping shadows of the 
 dry dock from the main flood of the river stands an 
 old-fashioned house of business. There are no tile- 
 paved passages, no lift, no smart commissionaires 
 here. To gain admittance to the sanctum where 
 our friend the ' Dry Docker ' transacts his leisurely 
 affairs you must push strenuously through a heavy 
 yard-gate, mount a wooden outside staircase, and 
 knock and ring as though you were at the door of 
 a private house. The rooms within once gained, 
 you are wafted away from the nineteenth into the 
 eighteenth century at once. A quaint hospitable 
 scent of grog and stale tobacco assaults your 
 nostrils pleasantly. Your eyes rest on comfortable 
 ramshackle desks of some dark old wood, placed 
 so that the writers at them may sit in arm-chairs 
 and look askance at the vistas of the shining grey 
 water outside — at the red sails of the slowly 
 travelling hay-barges, and the dusky spars of 
 innumerable far-travelled ships. Under your very 
 nose is the figure-head, a smirking Black-eyed 
 Susan, of some great sailing-ship which has been 
 successfully enticed into this particular dock, with 
 the traditional guinea for the captain to buy a new 
 * beaver ' withal, and innumerable drinks to boat- 
 swain and ship's carpenter. The masts and spars 
 
38 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 are bare of all canvas, unless we count the jerseys 
 and ducks which flap from their washing-line 
 between the main and mizen rigging. The decks 
 are untenanted now, save by the cook's black boy 
 and the master's mate's black cat. There is a 
 sense of rest in the air : you know that now at 
 any rate leviathans are taking their ease. 
 
 *' Over there a bright handful of fire crackles in 
 the fine old carved fireplace. The fireplaces, and 
 especially the mantelshelves, of forgotten east end 
 offices are often worthy of the most exacting 
 modern art furnisher, and this one is no exception 
 to the rule. Above it hang elevations, carefully 
 traced on the now-faded parchment, much affected 
 of vanished draughtsmen, representing the hulls, 
 and sterns, and prows of antique three-deckers. 
 There is a symmetry, a wealth of carven and 
 gilded detail about the old ships of Nelson's day 
 wherewith such offices as these seem quite in 
 keeping. The maps on the walls, with their titles 
 and dedications set amid profuse scrollwork and 
 stereotyped flourishes of penmanship, are as 
 venerable as the pictured men-of-war. This one 
 was dedicated ' to the gentlemen of New Lloyd's ' 
 so long ago as 1816. It is a map of the world, 
 and it represents Greenland intersected with 
 numerous projected canals, all of which are 
 destined to afford a north-west passage to China 
 and the Indies. Central Africa, especially that 
 part of it which Mr Stanley has lately traversed, 
 is void, save for a terrific dragon which does duty 
 
DOWSON THE DOCKER 39 
 
 for an as yet undiscovered Aruwimi and Upper 
 Congo. Australia is here written down New 
 Holland, and the islands and seas of Japan 
 are strangely mixed. There are marvellously- 
 contrived corner lockers in this dreamful retreat 
 of leisured business, and when the captain of the 
 ship close at hand comes up to launch a complaint 
 or make a payment — for his vessel is ' going out ' 
 to-night, and there will be much swearing and 
 opening of lock-gates after dark — the cupboards 
 are opened, and cigars and liqueurs, into the 
 importation whereof we should not inquire too 
 closely, are produced and discussed by the poor 
 work-worn plumitifs and their guests." 
 
 It was certainly an indiscretion of youth, for 
 one should not make copy out of one's friends' 
 possessions without first asking their leave. 
 
 Again I came back to the dock in trepidation. 
 The elder Mr Dowson, the poet's father, rushed at 
 me and " scragged " my arm, as a schoolboy might. 
 
 " You villain, what do you mean by describing 
 my dock in the papers ? " 
 
 Then he showed me a great pile of Globes on the 
 top of an old bureau. 
 
 " I give one to everybody who comes here/' 
 he was so kind as to say. 
 
 To the elder Dowson, that delightful man of an 
 older generation, the ancestral dock was a joy and 
 a pride. It should have furnished Ernest, the son, 
 with the tapestries he lacked. But he was a poet 
 
40 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 of one landscape and of static time, like so many 
 singers, notably perhaps old Frederick Tennyson, 
 whose works were reprinted in the autumn of 1913. 
 Max Nordau would have said of dear Ernest 
 Dowson that his sensations were of the decadent 
 order, and that he was subjective because he was 
 unaware of the objective. Who knows ? 
 
 Mr Dowson, senior, had been one longish voyage 
 out of the dock, to the Azores, I think. It had 
 lasted six weeks. As a young man he had fitted 
 out a barge like a prehistoric house-boat, in which 
 the staff of Punch, Sir F. (then Mr) Burnand among 
 them, and other celebrities, including the great 
 Swinburne himself, had cruised about in the ofhng 
 of the dock, putting in at home from time to time, 
 to take in supplies. He told me this and much 
 else in many interviews. He confessed to me once 
 at his own house that he was rather afraid of the 
 younger generation, and of Ernest in particular. 
 
 Twice I visited father, mother and son at their 
 home in the outskirts of Epping Forest. A 
 pleasant memory remains of a dark house, 
 where hospitality flourished, and in a study, the 
 sanctum of father and son, there was an arm-chair 
 with prodigiously long arms. In the drawing- 
 room was the portrait by Wills of the poet as a 
 little child. 
 
 We left the curious suburb where the Dowsons 
 then lived close to the high walls of a vast garden, 
 sepulchral with ancient evergreens, where a family 
 of old Quaker ladies were being buried at intervals 
 
DOWSON THE DOCKER 41 
 
 in a strange private mausoleum. To a man whose 
 life has been spent mainly in the south of England 
 everything to the north of the Thames, and in the 
 eastern counties, seems to contain an element of 
 the outlandish. 
 
 In the course of a rambling walk in the sight 
 of scattered offshoot groves of Epping Forest we 
 sighted long lines of funerals, scudding in the 
 direction of Walthamstow. We counted three or 
 four moodily and prophetically competing ! 
 
MARGINALIA 
 
 Writing under two assumed names, of which I 
 dare only quote one — '* Anatole de Montmartre " — 
 he joined with me and my then fellow-sufferer in 
 lodgings and lifelong friend, Mr Frank W. Walton, 
 now Librarian of King's College, London, in 
 annotating a volume of " The African Farm," by 
 Olive Schreiner. This was well before 1890. We 
 wrote as German commentators of the classics, 
 a race that had bothered us very much both at 
 Tonbridge and Oxford, and we were abusive of 
 one another and studiedly pedantic, as dear old 
 commentators should be, but M. de Montmartre 
 annotated quite gravely — I feel sure of that. He 
 belied his pseudonym, and set down his own views 
 seriously and with care. They are of course 
 fragmentary, but they are remarkable for a man 
 of twenty one or two, and I remember they struck 
 me at the time as singularly mature. 
 
 The German commentators, who rejoiced in the 
 two principal names of Schnutzius and Hans 
 Tiibner, were somewhat annoyed by De Mont- 
 martre's refusal to play the game of solemn 
 frivolity, but now his refusal has resulted in my 
 still possessing a little anthology of his pencil 
 marginalia, which is full of character and a curious 
 
 42 
 
MARGINALIA 43 
 
 sidelight on his mind in 1888 and later, though it 
 can in no sense be said to synthesise "a philosophy." 
 
 Dowson introduces himself by declaring that his 
 most decadent friends regard him as somewhat 
 of a heretic. Yet he is quite decadent in his first 
 utterance, when he writes : " The conclusion of the 
 whole matter," as comment on one of Miss Olive 
 Schreiner's mottoes: "A striving and a striving 
 and an ending in nothing." 
 
 Next we find him saying that some of the accom- 
 plished writer's phrases are " symbolic of the 
 entire inefficacy of all spiritual, supernatural help 
 in one's sorest need " — surely a strange phrase 
 from a future convert to faith. And so is this 
 in allusion to the passage in the text of the novel — 
 " When the little weary lamb we drive home drags 
 its feet, we seize on it, and carry it with its head 
 against our face. His little lamb ! " " By a 
 similar process," says Ernest Dowson, " did the 
 religious sentimental man invent the Immaculate 
 Conception. Cf. Zola's ' Faute de I'Abbe Mouret,' 
 Book I." Now, as every comparative religionist 
 knows, nothing of that kind was ever invented by 
 any man. It grew. 
 
 Later on the same page he cries : *' Helas, helas, 
 for the utter materialism of the feminine nature." 
 Then comes a dictum he was fond of quoting: 
 " The first theologic maxim which ever profoundly 
 impressed me was Stendhal's " La seule chose qui 
 excuse Dieu c'est qu'il n'existe pas" — a facile 
 blasphemy comparable to a famous present-day 
 
44 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 philosopher's allusion to the bankruptcy of the 
 Eternal, which he reserved for the occasion when 
 he first made his appearance as a preacher in a 
 Nonconformist pulpit. 
 
 When Schnutzius and Tiibner were debating the 
 authoress's dicta as to " wickedness " he cries : 
 ** Nay, O Schnutz (or Tiibner), why decide . . . 
 at all ? " But he is himself decisive. '' Whether 
 a man believes in a human-like God or no is a 
 small thing," says Olive Schreiner. And Dowson : 
 *'This is a profound saying. Theism, Pantheism, 
 Christianity, Positivism — they lie so close together 
 that it is like splitting hairs to consider them apart. 
 The vital issue is between optimism and pessimism." 
 Again, " ? Nature = God = Infinite Evil — so to 
 the pessimist this solatium is denied." This in 
 allusion to some optimist passage. 
 
 " Ere our death-day. Faith, I think, does pass, 
 and Love, but Knowledge abideth. Let us seek 
 Knowledge. At least let us shun emotion as 
 we would hell, for which it is a synonym. Let us 
 live in ourselves and for ourselves. A reasonable 
 self-love, without passion or thought of others, 
 and with the end of self-culture before us, is better 
 than a million emotions." 
 
 " Corollary — let us shun emotion and seek 
 knowledge only." And again, near the end of the 
 book : " O. S. seems to admit that the ideal State 
 is to be without hate, or love, or hope, or fear, or 
 desire — passionless . ' ' 
 
 Of annihilation he writes as of " an everlasting 
 
MARGINALIA 45 
 
 conscious inanition." He apparently quotes a 
 phrase, and one asks : " If there be consciousness, 
 how can there be annihilation ? " " Surely," he 
 says, " annihilation is not horrible," though hell 
 and heaven are horrible conceptions. 
 
 ** There must be a Hereafter because man longs 
 for it" (Schreiner). 
 
 " A very weak argument. A man may long for 
 water in Sahara, but he doesn't always get it " 
 (E. D.). 
 
 *' I object most strongly to a personal immor- 
 tality." 
 
 " Immortality ! Wretched ideal. Infinite ennui 
 — I die at the thought." 
 
 Of a character in the *' African Farm," who 
 was in the habit of locking himself up in his room 
 with books and a bottle of brandy, of which he 
 preferred the latter, Dowson says : '' Why not ? 
 It is the next best philosophy to suicide or fakir- 
 like asceticism — the latter best of all — only, alas ! 
 the flesh is weak, weak." 
 
 *' Self -contempt is respectable. Because we 
 strike a compromise with a loathsome existence 
 and take spleenfully the few poor gifts of the gods, 
 brandy, etc., shall Schnutz join with Eliza Cook " 
 — one of our doubles — " and call us mere beasts ? " 
 De Montmartre refers him to his approaching 
 volume, " Sacrements du Degout." 3 fr. 50 
 (Lemaire) . 
 
 Miss Schreiner makes one of her characters 
 suppose that, if wine, philosophy and women 
 
46 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 keep the dream of life from becoming a nightmare, 
 so much the better. 
 
 " They at least, women," cries Ernest Dowson, 
 of course always in his assumed character, " are 
 hardly fit even for that. They make it a worse 
 nightmare than ever." 
 
 Of a passage which he does not like he cries : 
 " Typical inherent bassesse in woman's nature — 
 the brutal method, the only method with woman — 
 e.g. the perverse pleasure (to be observed in a 
 hundred cases) with which a woman sets herself 
 to degrade and obliterate the feminine ideal if she 
 comes across a man with any faith in it." 
 
 Manifestly here is the timid young male spirit 
 clothing itself in the defensive garment of mis- 
 ogyny. Most young poets have passed through 
 that phase. 
 
 ** Men," says Olive Schreiner, " are like the 
 earth and we are the moon ; we turn always one 
 side to them, and they think there is no other, 
 because they don't see it — but there is." 
 
 " And the reverse instance is as true," follows 
 Dowson 's comment — " only women don't believe 
 we have another side than the obvious one, even 
 when we show it." 
 
 At the end of " Waldo's Stranger " he gathers 
 regretfully that his fellow-commentators do not 
 share his admiration for this most striking chapter 
 (chapter ii., part ii.). 
 
 He returns to his misogyny and we must 
 remember that he is still very young. 
 
MARGINALIA 47 
 
 He believes, perhaps with his tongue in his 
 cheek, *' that women are several incarnations 
 behind men (as cats are behind dogs), and that 
 they entirely lack a certain spiritual principle 
 which exists even in the most bestial man." 
 
 " L3mdall is a charming, pathetic, typical 
 figure, typical of the nineteenth century, with 
 its spleen, its self -consciousness, its fine ideals and 
 its perpetual falling between them, its unrest 
 and its dominant note of ineffectuality, of sensu- 
 ality which it cannot escape from nor frankly 
 accept, but can simply temporise with and 
 despise." 
 
 The devil, who sends children, according to a 
 character in the novel, is, according to Ernest 
 Dowson, " * the Evil Will which baits its trap with 
 the illusion Love and scatters the illusion to the 
 winds when its purpose is fulfilled.' Cf. Schopen- 
 hauer's chapter on Sex and Desire. * L'hamme9on 
 est evident, et neamoins on y a mordu, on y 
 mo rdra tou jours ' " (Renan). 
 
 " Some say the Devil carried the seed from hell, 
 and planted it on the earth to plague men and 
 make them sin" (Schreiner). 
 
 *' A theological and figurative expression of my 
 own theory " (Dowson). 
 
 '' ' Se sacrifier a ses passions ! passe. Mais 
 a des passions qu'on n'a pas ! Triste XIX^ 
 Siecle ! ' " (Stendhal, quoted thus by D.). 
 
 ** Actually I doubt if passion ever did or could 
 elevate a commonplace man to this extent " (in 
 
48 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 reference to the episode of Gregory turning nurse) . 
 " Passion is waste — takes away from a man's 
 stability, his self-centralization : its action on 
 general culture, sestheticism, philosophy, many- 
 sidedness, all that makes life endurable, is ruinous. 
 It fastens on life like a cancer." 
 
 " Did Lyndall finally see passion, with Stendhal, 
 as a lottery, ' bonheur cherche par des fous, 
 duperie certaine ' ? " 
 
 Summing up, Ernest Dowson finds that his two 
 chief collaborators are hopelessly tainted with 
 sentimentalism. As Anatole de Montmartre, " he 
 is more often in sympathy with Blotzius, and 
 will be happy to revile a most abominable world 
 with him over an absinthe at any time. Strangely 
 enough, with Miss E. Cook he is more often d' accord 
 than he would have believed. . . . From an 
 entirely different point of view they deduce 
 precisely the same practical corollary. For 
 Schnutz, [De Montmartre] fears that only a deeper 
 study of Schopenhauer and an adhesion to some 
 of the tenets of Plato, will ever conduct him to 
 Nirvana. In conclusion he has a deep distrust of 
 the flowers that grow in the Garden of Propertius. 
 And the fruit of that garden he avows to be Dead 
 Sea Apples, whereof, if a man eats, he shall surely 
 die." 
 
 Strange, is it not, to read all this ? Much of it 
 is trite and trivial enough. Young Oxford of the 
 eighties was pessimistic : it affected, here and 
 there, to worship Buddha, and it read its Schopen- 
 
MARGINALIA 49 
 
 hauer and much else. And Ernest Dowson read 
 his Stendhal. 
 
 But, conversely, much more of this is extremely 
 interesting. As I write, at Christmas time 1913, 
 a few weeks before the anniversary of my friend's 
 death nearly fourteen years ago, the programme 
 of last Sunday's Queen's Hall Concert comes to 
 hand. One of the pieces was Granville Bantock's 
 " Comedy Overture," " The Pierrot of the 
 Minute," of which the libretto is Ernest Dowson's. 
 In giving some account of " the unfortunate poet," 
 Mrs Rosa Newmarch quotes Mr Arthur Symons' 
 characterisation of Dowson's art. " He had the 
 pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any ' 
 other quality of mind or emotion." 
 
 I have ventured to italicise. Yet here, suiely, 
 and in some preceding pages, we have had f 
 evidences of *' quality of mind," and of emotion j 
 we shall have evidence later on. Emotion ? — ^his j 
 life was an agony of emotion ! j 
 
 To me, who knew a few of the facts and am 
 guessing others in sorrowful retrospect, the miracle 
 of Ernest Dowson was his conversion — in every 
 sense of that word. 
 
 Here is a lurid, woman-hating sceptic, who, in 
 a year or two, becomes a convert to Rome, believes, 
 takes the significance of gems seriously, falls in 
 love ! J 
 
 Perhaps, indeed, the best reason for Ernest 
 Dowson's early production of exquisite poetry 
 
50 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 was this — ^that he was preparing to fall in love. 
 He fell in love, or fancied that he did. His love- 
 affair was, it struck me from the first, a matter of 
 imagination, or of common form, which ended by 
 being a torture. I cannot enter into it. 
 
 We do not, I trust, even in memoirs, desecrate 
 the arcana of others, the sanctities which, in given 
 cases, we cannot at all understand. Had my 
 beloved friend lived fifty years ago, instead of 
 fifteen, I might, perhaps, as an octogenarian, have 
 attempted an analysis of his case, into the secret of 
 which he affectionately inducted me perhaps more 
 than anyone else now living. As it is, I decide to 
 pass it over. 
 
 Yet the poet's love affair, far more than his 
 conversion to Rome, is the well-spring of his 
 spirit in the letters which follow. 
 
 In 1892 the aimless young fellow, full of dread- 
 ful views on marriage and the rest, has become 
 a chastened lover, just as, at Missolonghi, the 
 coxcomb Byron became a hero. 
 
 Alas ! the reticence, which is perhaps the quint- 
 essence of criticism and biography, compels me to 
 omit passages, nay to suppress whole letters of 
 great beauty, which some ruthless hand may give 
 to the Press a century hence. But omission is 
 what he would have desired. He ends one notable 
 letter with the word " tacendum," sometimes the 
 kindliest watchword in reminiscences. 
 
 Could the daringly unconventional love affairs 
 of two young poets, both constitutionally timid, 
 
MARGINALIA 51 
 
 be made public and set out in detail — could love 
 be made the clue to his changed mood, these letters 
 would be fully explanatory of themselves. As it 
 is, I shall have to base them on mystery and thus 
 allow them to blossom the more for those who 
 read reverently between the lines. 
 
ON RE-PRINTING A POET'S LETTERS 
 
 Vagrant and fragrant as June's midnight breeze. 
 Transient as a child's sorrow, yet as true. 
 Faint as shell-murmurs of forgotten seas. 
 These phrases writ by you ! 
 
 Why print them ? Wherefore not, since they assert 
 Your spirit's charm, and bring to some again 
 Your high and musing features still unhurt. 
 Still untransformed by pain ? 
 
 Since, too, the tongue of Cavil wags, why not 
 Draw back your very soul through Death's dark doors. 
 And from the mirror of the Present blot 
 An image nowise yours ? 
 
 V. P. 
 
 52 
 
THE LETTERS 1 
 
 I 
 
 Almost my first letter from him was dated from 
 15 Bristol Gardens, Maida Hill. It may date from 
 1891 or early in 1892. 
 
 " Caro Mio, — Can you come and have supper 
 with us here, next Sunday about 8 ? There is a 
 certain W — d P — k, of treasure hunt fame, of 
 Oxford and of Allahabad to be with us, whom my 
 father thinks you might care to meet. . . . There 
 is much to be said. I am down in Gehenna ; I 
 hope you are up in the clouds. . . . From every 
 point of view this is a tedious world, unhappily 
 rendered so perhaps, more than it need be, by 
 foolish conventionalities and proprieties of one's 
 relations and friends ; and by the entire lack of 
 charity in one's scandal-loving acquaintance. No 
 
 more. Tuissimus, 
 
 *' (Signed) Ernest Dowson." 
 
 His letters are rarely dated, and it has not been 
 easy to place them. The following one, however, 
 is of an early period. The next belongs to the time 
 
 ^ These are reprinted almost exactly as written, the French 
 being non- italicised. 
 
 53 
 
54 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 of the publication of the " Book of the Rhymers' 
 Club," early in 1892. 
 
 He writes from 15 Bristol Gardens : 
 
 " Cher Vieux, — What must you think of me ? 
 It must be three weeks since I wrote you a ream of 
 spleen, having incidentally to say how grieved I 
 was not to be able to join you and Hillier on a 
 certain Sunday. And, a day or two ago, I found 
 I had posted the letter in a pocket ! . . . May we 
 meet soon in Valhalla at anyrate. for after Gotter- 
 dammerung there is haply Valhalla, and I think 
 this is the twilight of the gods : but what I mean 
 exactly, I could put more precisely in a sonnet, 
 which might be found obscure. What are you 
 doing ? If you have a spare moment, write to 
 me ; your letters appeal to my t6 n r^v elvat more 
 than anything : or what are you not doing ? 
 which is generally the most important form of 
 action ! I do nothing, live in a sort of dream, 
 of nothing : and I have never before lived to such 
 an exhausting extent. To find an irrational 
 residuum in oneself, eluding one's last analysis, is 
 r by some strange freak reasonably a consolation. 
 Does not a great, personal passion become a whole 
 metaphysic ? At least an abstract metaphysical 
 notion, or a sacrament, or a mystery, or a miracle, 
 in certain lights, becomes more credible than any 
 material thing or appearance, one's mere going 
 or doing, or talk or juxtaposition or the death one 
 will die. 
 
THE LETTERS 55 
 
 " But I don't want to send you an essay on 
 the absolute, and will conclude with a prayer for 
 forgiveness, for these random impressions. But 
 I wanted to write a word to you ; and this by the 
 way, because of all men I know you are most 
 likely to find me intelligible. Though I have 
 done, nor said, nor suffered anything tangible 
 since I last saw or wrote to you, I write as an 
 illuminato : I seem to have seen mysteries, and 
 if I fail to be explicit, it is because my eyes 
 are dazzled. 
 
 " I have not seen anyone very lately — ^until a 
 few days ago, that is — ^not so much for any ailment 
 as for a great lack of energy which has come over 
 me." Referring to a conversation with Lionel 
 Johnson he continues : '' I confess, however, that 
 I have long passed the point at which one is 
 seriously moved by hostile criticism of anybody 
 in these questions or can feel any more than a 
 tolerant contempt for the point of view from which 
 it is uttered. To take the world so seriously ! \ 
 Enfin c'est trop bete. God or the Flesh or the,; 
 Devil — an artist may be in bondage to any one or x 
 other or all of these Powers and retain his self- / 
 respect — but the world mustn't, positively must 
 not exist for him — or so much the worse for his art. ^ 
 Cher Poete je vous embrasse. My mother has 
 been very ill, is still unaccountably weak ; after 
 six weeks of the influenza with complications she 
 can still scarcely walk across the room. These 
 
56 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 are parlous times. Would God we were all in 
 Samoa, with others. The Rhymers' Rhymes are 
 out : and a copy for each poem of every con- 
 tributor is at our disposal." 
 
 Bridge Dock, 
 
 LiMEHOUSE, E. 
 
 " Carissime, — ^Yes : there is a copy of the Book 
 of Rhymes for each poem, which will mean, will it 
 not, that there are five awaiting you somewhere. 
 The person to apply to, I believe, is not Elkin 
 Mathews, but Greene of Pembroke Gardens, 
 unless perhaps the two advance copies which were 
 brought to each contributor, to the Cheshire, on 
 the last meeting, and which are all I have at 
 present, may have been handed on to Johnson 
 to be forwarded to you. 
 
 " The book is very good — better than I expected, 
 although the binding leaves much to be desired. 
 And I still hold, that certain rejections amongst 
 your poems are at least as charming as certain of 
 the selected. 
 
 " Your letter surprises me, yes ! it certainly 
 surprises me." 
 
 Here follows a lecture from Lionel Johnson, 
 ending, " impracticable, and foolish, and irrespon- 
 sible. As you say, however, what does it matter ? 
 — ^since to-morrow one dies ! The criticisms of 
 one's friends — ' rumores senum severiorum ' — 
 allons done ! No — 
 
THE LETTERS 57 
 
 •- Non ego nunc tristes vereor, mea Cynthia, manes, 
 Nee moror extremo debita fata rogo : 
 Sed ne forte tuo careat mihi funus amore. 
 Hie timor est ipsis durior exequiis." 
 
 These, the opening lines of Elegy XIX., Book L, 
 of Propertius, may be roughly Englished : 
 
 -- Sweet one, I fear not now the ghostly state, 
 Nor would I hinder what I owe to fate ! 
 But lest thy love desert me on my pyre, 
 -Tis this I fear more than the funeral fire !'' 
 
 Ernest Dowson loved his Propertius, and the 
 same may be said of Goethe, who never read the 
 Elegies " ohne eine Erschiitterung/' One wonders 
 where and when the poets read. There is a 
 singular, a poignant parallelism between the great 
 and prolonged cri du cceur of the old Roman and 
 the modern's sorrowful lament, as expressed, for 
 instance, in his Cynara poem, ^ the boldness of 
 which is august with the spirit of antiquity, as 
 though the pagan had passed into and inspired the 
 unhappy lad of the day before yesterday. The 
 grave people, doubtless not readers of the classics, 
 who find much to shock them in this poem, must 
 bear in mind the possibility of these transmigra- 
 tions of spirit, or, an you will, survivals. And let 
 them turn, too, to the older master and, among his 
 trivialities and his sensuousness, experience their 
 
 ^"Cynara" was suggested to Dowson by the Cinara of 
 Horace, celebrated in Book IV. of the Odes, and doubtless 
 an actual woman unlike Lalage and others. See Carm. 
 Lib. IV., i., 11. 3-4. Horace suggested, but Propertius 
 inspired. 
 
 r 
 
58 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 Erschiltterung when they light on such splendid 
 passages, so thrilled with the pure religion of the 
 lover, as this : — 
 
 '• Tu mihi sola domus, tu, Cynthia, sola parentes, 
 Omnia tu nostrae tempora laetitiae. 
 Seu tristis veniam, seu contra laetus amicis : 
 Quicquid ero, dicam, Cynthia causa fuit.'' 
 
 -' You are my home ancestral : Cynthia, you 
 Are as a father and a mother to me. 
 And every hour of joy that I ensue 
 Is Cynthia. If with thoughts that half undo me 
 I walk, or if with smiles my friends I meet : 
 Whate'er I shall become, I'll say, — ' My sweet 
 Was cause thereof.' "- 
 
 The English will not do at all. Either, with 
 Keats, one introduces an Elizabethan element into 
 an imitation of the ancient manner, or an element of 
 humour, of triviality. The translator is a traducer 
 in any case. He cannot grapple with the terseness 
 of a tombstone text. I remember, in horrible Fleet 
 Street days — Fleet Street is, of course, quite 
 different now — shortly before Dowson's letter 
 was written to me, a poor old Polish prince of 
 an extreme antiquity of race being roared to 
 at intervals, as thus : '* There's nothing in French 
 that can't be put in fewer words in honest 
 English ! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, 
 Smithius ! " 
 
 Smithius was the poor old prince's Fleet Street 
 incognito. He spoke French when not speaking 
 
THE LETTERS 59 
 
 broken English : he had been one of Napoleon 
 III/s secretaries with Alphonse Daudet. 
 
 But this is not true. French and Latin are 
 monumentally terse just where English is not, 
 and vice versa. It was left to Ernest Dowson to 
 reproduce something of the Latin brevity and 
 clarity in his verse. I fancy that he consciously 
 strove after that. We strive for nothing now but 
 to be queer, and, as there are only a limited 
 number of permutations and combinations in the 
 algebra of ideas, we have sometimes to turn aside 
 and be merely insane. To insanity, delirium 
 and mysticism vast unmapped spaces are open. 
 
 I return to the letter. It is impossible to quote 
 what Lionel Johnson said, for here we should 
 be treading on the ground which is forbidden. 
 Poor Johnson, who was so fond of saying, 
 half humorously : " Respectability is the best 
 policy " ! 
 
 The " to-morrow one dies " phrase recurred 
 constantly in Dowson 's talk. " Aprbs nous le 
 diluge " was almost his motto. The young men 
 of the Decadence were for ever acting and speaking 
 as though after their time all would be chaos, and 
 yet that period is twenty years ago, and they are 
 many of them dead, and everything goes on as 
 usual. There is the same crush of traffic outside 
 the Bank of England, as Matthew Arnold 
 prophesied to the old gentlemen that there 
 would be if the old gentlemen were to perish on 
 a sudden. 
 
6o ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 The letter ends : 
 
 " Pardon these incoherencies and accept my 
 gratitude for your charming sympathy. Tout a 
 toi, 
 
 " (Signed) Ernest Dowson. 
 
 "PS. — ^The latest Rhymer is one Barlas,i a 
 charming poet and anarchist, who was lately run 
 in for shooting the House of Commons. And the 
 latest news — ^that Gray, of whom I am seeing a 
 good deal just at present, pursues the ' Star ' for 
 a libel asserting him to be *the original Dorian 
 of that name.' This will be droll." 
 
 Discussing the first " Book of the Rliymers' 
 Club " in February 1892 he says : 
 
 *' I am amused to find that my cursory acquaint- 
 ance with the Anthology of Anthologies has made 
 such a deep impression on my manner — or can it 
 be that my reviewer does not know what the Gr. 
 Anthology is about ? 
 
 " I didn't go to the Rhymers last night, nor to the 
 last meeting but one, chiefly because the meetings 
 were in inaccessible places and the night was cold, 
 and partly because I was in a condition too Ijnrical 
 even for the society of poets. So I have not run 
 across Greene ; but you will be glad to hear that 
 the Edition is entirely exhausted. ... In effect 
 
 From T^e Times obituary, August 1914. — "On the 15th 
 inst., at Glasgow, John Evelyn Barlas, B.A., New College, 
 Oxford (' Evelyn Douglas '), aged 54.*' 
 
THE LETTERS 6i 
 
 I am become far too absorb to do anything but 
 
 sit, in , and gather the exquisite moments. 
 
 For — to quote mes derniers : — 
 
 ** * The wisdom of the world said unto me.' -- 
 
 Here follows the MS. of his " Sapientia Lunae," 
 which will be found at p. 50 of ** Verses." 
 
 In allusion to Professor Image's kindly and 
 dignified notice of the Rhymers' Book he adds : 
 
 " P.S. — Dear Image ! How charming his 
 notice is." 
 
 " Bridge Dock, Limehouse. 
 " May 19, 1S92. 
 " I myself have had one of the worst rheums 
 within my memory." 
 
 Referring again to the Rhymers' Club meetings 
 he says : 
 
 *' It is ages since I have managed to go to 
 one ; as a rule now I am too chronically irritated 
 to go anywhere, except at rare, precarious intervals 
 when there happens to be nowhere to go, and 
 nothing to do. I am making rhymes in the 
 meantime and trying to write a short story. Is 
 your Muse fertile just now ? " 
 
 The mention of the death of Tennyson, which 
 occurred on 6th October 1892, dates the next 
 letter. Ernest Dowson had, at that time, perhaps 
 already begun to pay his customary week-end 
 visits to us at Blackheath, where my wife and I 
 
62 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 lived after our marriage in August 1892. He 
 might well have been with us at Haslemere in the 
 autumn of that year, when my mother and I 
 caught our only glimpse of her idol, the august 
 old Laureate, as he took his last drive abroad, 
 accompanied by a sick-nurse. 
 
 " Cher Vieux, — I have had a great many tedious 
 things to do ; I have also had a cold : they are 
 both now arranged to a certain extent, and I am 
 able to do what I should have done before. . . . 
 Were you at the Rhymers last night ? I wish I 
 could have managed to be of the party. I suppose 
 it is settled that we are to hold the Laurelship as 
 a corporate office, and present the butt of Canary 
 to the patron du Cheshire, as a composition for 
 free drinks. I am sorry that Tennyson has 
 crossed the bar : if only, that it leaves us so much 
 at the mercy of L. Morris, Austin et Cie. But he 
 was un grand poete, tout de meme. Above all I 
 love him because he did sacredly hate the mob, 
 which whether it be the well-dressed mob whom 
 Browning pandered to, or the evil-smelling mob to 
 which William Morris does now to the detriment 
 of his art and the offence of his own dignity still 
 pander, I hold alike to be damnable, unwholesome 
 and obscene. . . . My muse awoke from her 
 torpor of many months yesterday : here is her 
 feeble utterance, but she may run to another 
 verse by and by." 
 
 There follows the MS. of " In Autumn." 
 
THE LETTERS 63 
 
 It will already have become apparent from these 
 letters that Dowson was a devotee of the Rhymers' 
 Club, but I do not remember him there, and 
 probably missed him as I always missed my 
 friend Mr Richard Le Gallienne. The notable 
 Rhymers I remember well were John Davidson, 
 Lionel Johnson and Mr Yeats. Once the two 
 last, Dowson, and myself remained at a meeting in 
 Johnson's rooms after the rest had gone. Mr 
 Yeats proposed that we should in future debate on 
 poetry, and by way of beginning he made a speech, 
 pointing out that poetry had at one time passed 
 through four stages, which were, I think, the 
 Diabolic, the Seraphic, the Celestial, and some- 
 thing else. In the interests of truth it fell to my 
 ungrateful lot to point out that poetry originated 
 among savages and consisted at first of not much 
 more than lists of laudatory titles, chanted again 
 and again by hunters or warriors in praise of 
 the successful man among their number. Ernest 
 Dowson scented modern science here, became 
 uneasy, and voted down poetry debates in future. 
 
 From one point of view he was right, for, at the 
 present moment, " chatter about Shelley," and 
 poetry debate generally, account for much of our 
 sterility, timidity and lack of enthusiasm. 
 
 The Rhymers held one memorable meeting in 
 Mr Herbert Home's rooms in the Fitzroy settle- 
 ment. They were then, so to speak, rediscovered 
 and reconstituted, having previously been but a 
 small group of Dublin poets. It was an evening 
 
< 
 
 64 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 of notabilities. Mr Walter Crane stood with his 
 back to the mantelpiece, deciding, very kindly, 
 on the merits of our effusions. And round Oscar 
 Wilde, not then under a cloud, hovered reverently 
 Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, with others. 
 This must have been in 1891, and I marvelled at 
 the time to notice the fascination which poor 
 Wilde exercised over the otherwise rational. He 
 sat as it were enthroned and surrounded by a 
 deferential circle. Describing the scene from 
 hearsay, my friend Mr Morley Roberts declared 
 that Wilde wore a black shirt front and that 
 Dowson and Johnson, small fairy creatures in 
 white, climbed about upon it. Of the close of this 
 meeting, or of a quite other gathering in my own 
 rooms in January, 1892, the same brilliant weaver 
 of fancies declared that all the people present 
 clasped hands and whirled down the stairs like 
 human Catherine wheels, striking sparks as they 
 went on the stone stairs, where to this day hang 
 Professor Image's fine cartoons of Saint Peter and 
 other saints. 
 
 Music at all times is much more popular than 
 poetry, and now that Mr Granville Bantock's 
 setting of Dowson's " Pierrot of the Minute " is 
 becoming a piece de resistance at classical concerts 
 the ghostly poet is likely to ride into a greater 
 vogue on the shoulders of sound. 
 
 " This graceful phantasy," says Mrs Newmarch, 
 " with its setting that recalls some exquisite scene 
 
THE LETTERS 65 
 
 by Fragonard, is full of suggestion to a composer 
 of quick imagination, and Bantock has responded 
 with an almost lavish wealth of thematic material. 
 Motive succeeds motive as quickly as thoughts 
 pursue each other in a dream. . . . The work is 
 scored for piccolo, two flutes, one oboe, two 
 clarinets (A and B flat), one bassoon, three horns, 
 two trumpets, one trombone, timpani (chromatic), 
 tambourine, glockenspiel, triangle, harp, and the 
 usual strings, divisi." 
 
 How would the retiring poet, who hated the mob 
 and dreaded any battalion that advanced in more 
 than twos and threes, have been staggered by this 
 regiment of instruments ! I can see him now, 
 in my mind's eye, musing on the situation with 
 pouting lip and fixity of rounded orb, and after- 
 wards with a shrug and a kind of half smile, as 
 though, seeing that he rather suspected humour 
 as such, he nevertheless liked the recognition, the 
 publicity, the glory, and was not sure whether to 
 laugh or not. 
 
 Yet Dowson's poetry has a kind of kinship to a 
 certain sort of music, though he used to quote with 
 amusement Gau tier's dictum that music is the 
 most disagreeable of sounds. His lovely poems 
 that spring out so suddenly and inevitably among 
 the classicisms, the verbiage, the prose poetry and 
 futurist experiments of others, can truly be com- 
 pared to some melody by some great composer who 
 forgot for the nonce to be a great composer, as did 
 the dying Schubert when he perhaps wrote the score 
 
66 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 of that sublime and longing l3n:ic that is the theme 
 of his ** Unfinished Symphony " (First Movement). 
 
 By the by, I have no recollection of Dowson's 
 laughter at any time. Some otherwise cultivated 
 people we remember always by their cynic or 
 hyaena guffaw, which might buist out on one's 
 grave, but I fancy I never heard Dowson laugh, 
 though his low and somewhat broken voice half 
 remains in recollection. He refused ever to 
 recite his verses at the Rhymers' meetings, declar- 
 ing that he had no gift that way. He shuddered 
 at that kind of publicity, and left the task to others 
 — ^to Lionel Johnson, perchance, who read marvel- 
 lously, as a man peritunis, or to Mr W. B. Yeats, 
 whose half -chant is incomparable. 
 
 Writing on 24th October 1892, we find our poet 
 in the throes of Pierrot composition. Many times 
 he referred in conversation to the difficulties 
 which he experienced when writing to order. Alas ! 
 towards the close of his life he did little else. 
 
 " I have been frightfully busy, having rashly 
 undertaken to make a little Pierrot play in verse 
 for Peters, 1 which is to be played at Aldershot, 
 and afterwards at the Chelsea Town Hall : the 
 article to be delivered in a fortnight. So until 
 
 1 In his published letters Aubrey Beardsley writes at 
 this time of making drawings for a tiresome playlet of 
 Ernest Dowson's ! The principal parts were taken by 
 the late Theodore Peters and JVIiss Beardsley, sister of 
 the artist, and the play was produced at the Albert Hall 
 Theatre. 
 
THE LETTERS 67 
 
 this period of severe mental agony be past, I can 
 go nowhere. ... I searched for you at the 
 Independent Theatre the other night, but you 
 were not. Meeting there, along with many other 
 persons, the poet Green, I undertook to send out 
 notices for a Rhymers' meeting au Cheshire on 
 Friday next the . Will you take this in lieu 
 
 of a post-card and endeavour to come. I have a 
 quaint old German coming . . . whom you will 
 appreciate. 
 
 " L. J. was here on Sat. and slept here. He 
 told me that your Chouan poem, which I like 
 immeasurably, has been taken by Macmillan : 
 My congratulations ! I have a map of Morbihan 
 hanging up over me now : mine eyes water at the 
 sight of it. Quousque tandem. Do mine ! . . . I 
 would this play were done : half of it is com- 
 pleted and I have seven days more, but the second 
 half is mightily oppressing me. And I am horribly 
 afraid that when it is written I may be worried 
 with rehearsals and enforced company with 
 terrible South Kensington young ladies and 
 fashionable Chelsea mesdames. Have you heard 
 that Home is now in the Temple and the sacred 
 house in Fitzroy Street is full of men who know 
 not Joseph ? 
 
 The sacred house, about which a volume might 
 be written, had, from about the year 1891, been 
 the home of the Hobby Horse writers, and of at 
 least one outsider. My dear friend Professor 
 
68 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 Selwyn Image still lives there, and will he forgive 
 me if I remind him that the house was at one time 
 referred to as " Fitzroy " and that " Fitzroy " was 
 a movement, an influence, a glory ? There were 
 several Fitzroy institutions — notably what was 
 known as " Fitzroy silence " at our austere 
 dinners and lunches. Lionel Johnson, when I left 
 " Fitzroy," declared that it became full of strong 
 mysterious men, who clamoured for large chops 
 and steaks at meals. They are probably very 
 eminent persons by this time. 
 
 The original dwellers in ''Fitzroy," before my 
 time, were Mr Herbert Home, who with Professor, 
 then Mr, Selwyn Image edited The Hobby Horse, 
 Mr Gal ton, editor of Matthew Arnold and Lionel 
 Johnson, Mr Arthur Macmurdo, and Lionel 
 Johnson himself. Professor Image at that time 
 kept a studio there, as did the late Mr Machlachlan 
 the landscapist. Mr Randall Da vies studied 
 design under Mr Macmurdo and the late Hubert 
 Crackanthorpe was for a time a pupil of Professor 
 Image. Numbers of other distinguished people 
 visited this artistic colony. The list of them 
 would include Mr Mortimer Menpes, Mr Frank 
 Brangwyn (a constant visitor), Mr Walter Crane, 
 the late Oscar Wilde, Mr Dolmetsch, Mr Ernest 
 Rhys, Mr W. B. Yeats, Mr Will. Rothenstein, 
 Father John Gray, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, and 
 a host more. Ernest Dowson had lunched there 
 in the earliest days and had made me emulous to 
 enter the sacred precincts. As a later member of 
 
THE LETTERS 69 
 
 *' Fitzroy," in succession to Mr Gallon, I had the 
 honour of introducing our foreign discoverer, 
 M. George Olivier Destree, then editor of La Jeune 
 Belgique, and now Father Bruno, into the charmed 
 circle. 
 
 *' I must look you up at King's soon," the 
 letter concludes. *' . . . In the meanwhile a 
 dyspeptic little poem 'to His Lady and His 
 Friend.' " 
 
 There follows the glorious " In Tempore Senec- 
 tutis," with its motto from the Vulgate : " Junior 
 fui etenim senui " (Ps. xxxvii. 25). 
 
 The next letter, dated in January, 1893, begins 
 a prolific epistolary period. He alludes in it to 
 one of the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam's Church and 
 Stage parties, which took place always in January, 
 and were a brilliant and picturesque episode in the 
 crowded artistic life of the early nineties. They 
 should be put on record. The customary scene in 
 his beautiful drawing-rooms will remain impressed 
 on the minds of his many grateful guests. 
 
THE LETTERS 
 
 II 
 
 " Dearest Vieux, — It is I, who should apologise 
 for taking leave of you so cavalierly. It was a 
 charming visit ; my gratitude to you all for the 
 same. . . . Were you at Headlam's ? I was too 
 sick and sorry to come. I fear my affairs will not 
 bear talking over, or writing about. They are like 
 a Chinese puzzle ; and grow more confused and 
 inextricable the closer one considers them. I 
 endeavour to possess my soul in patience, but the 
 result is not so much resignation as a sort of sloth 
 and tristitia, ' which even monkish moralists 
 have held to be of the nature of a sin.' It is 
 a vile and stupid world ; and it will be good 
 to have done with it. In the meantime, ever 
 yours, 
 
 " [Signed) Ernest Dowson. 
 
 "P.T.O. — Appended the last effort of my 
 muse." 
 
 This is " Terre Promise," that lovely three- verse 
 poem, which appears at p. 34 of " Verses." He 
 dates it i6th January 1893. 
 
 70 
 
THE LETTERS 71 
 
 To the late Professor Warr, who was in search of 
 an accomplished young fellow to read German 
 and play the violin to an old invalid gentleman, 
 I recommended Ernest Dowson, for he was in 
 those days always in quest of some sort of per- 
 manent employment apart from the dock. The 
 poet, I knew, was no violinist, but it was supposed 
 that he might make up in general culture and 
 charm for the lack of musical accomplishment. 
 His German, also, was problematical, but again 
 it was thought that German might be dispensed 
 with if the candidate had once presented himself. 
 He writes characteristically without date as usual. 
 
 " Cher Vieux, — What must you think of me 
 for the ungrateful silence ? But I have been so 
 beset with inevitable correspondence that I 
 have not possessed my soul since I saw you. I 
 interviewed Warr on Sunday concerning Taffaire 
 Williams and learnt from him what I heard in your 
 letter of Monday that a musician was required. 
 But he was charming and I was glad to have met 
 him. Also I believe secretly I was glad that the 
 matter had fallen through for I have not the 
 
 courage I fear to absent myself from St for 
 
 so long. 
 
 " You will have seen perhaps some of our reviews. 
 Their benevolence has taken my breath away. 
 The Speaker, Daily Chronicle, Telegraph, Scotsman, 
 all favourable, some of them gushing, and this 
 week's Graphic, which has just come to hand. 
 
72 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 So far the only downright bad one was in the 
 World, 
 
 " I was staying with Teixeira ^ last night in the 
 Temple, and sat up for long talking to Sherard who 
 is there and who came over with Zola and is 
 writing a biography of him for Chatto and Windus. 
 He is charming but the most morose and spleenful 
 person I have yet encountered. His conversation 
 is undiluted vitriol — like the man — nescio quem 
 in ' La Premiere Maitresse.' Also this morning 
 Gray who is finally leaving the Temple — quantum 
 mutatus ab isto — fat but friendly, I fear incurably 
 given over to social things — and about to take up 
 his abode in Park Lane ! This is sad. I have to 
 return you your Spenser." 
 
 This agreeable epistle is libellous. We know 
 what Mr Robert Harborough Sherard did for our 
 poor friend. Ernest Dowson died in his arms. 
 This artless first impression is curious in view of 
 the affection that Dowson afterwards conceived 
 for him. 
 
 Professor Warr, who, with the charming and 
 accomplished Mrs Warr, is not in the index of 
 Mr Holbrook Jackson's " Eighteen Nineties," 
 was a force in his time. Somewhere in the mid- 
 eighties, also a great period, he introduced Greek 
 plays to London, and his Tale of Troy, followed 
 up later in 1886 by the Alcestis at Queen's 
 College, Harley Street, were widely illustrated 
 ^ Mr Teixeira de Mattos. 
 
THE LETTERS 73 
 
 and much discussed performances. All of us who 
 had any hand in them were under the impression 
 that nothing much in that line could happen 
 after our time. The charming scenery — a Greek 
 temple — was painted, I think, by Alma Tadema, 
 but latterly Professor Warr found it difficult to 
 dispose of. Mr Walter Crane helped him greatly in 
 these performances, and pictures of them from his 
 brush, as well as a delightful set of furniture from 
 his designs, adorned the Warrs' beautiful house. 
 
 The Professor's death was very sudden. I had 
 been to call on him one morning at King's College, 
 Strand, and had handed to him Rostand's extra- 
 ordinarily fine and, with us, unpopular poem on 
 Kruger. He put it in his pocket, and at two 
 o'clock, walking to the top of a steep staircase 
 in the Temple, fell down dead of heart disease. 
 His wife survived him for some years. She died 
 of dysentery on board a ship travelling from 
 Athens to Syracuse. Previously she had, as she 
 told me, suffered greatly from malaria during an 
 exploration of Etruscan cities in Italy. 
 
 The passing away of this most distinguished 
 couple of the old school closed one of those 
 admirable salons, admission to which was obtained 
 by culture rather than by notoriety. Of such I 
 know no example now. Another pair of childless 
 couples, whose reminiscences and associations 
 were almost historic, were Sir Joseph and Lady 
 Prestwich of Oxford and Shoreham, and Sir John 
 and Lady Simon of Kensington Square. One met 
 
74 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 everybody in their salons. Sir John, for instance, 
 had been the friend of Ruskin, whose executor he 
 was in an early will, of Thackeray, Rossetti, Ellen 
 Terry, William Morris — ^half the old glorious world 
 that came before the Decadence. Dowson used to 
 talk of visits to some wonderful old survivor of the 
 time of Waterloo. The lady is doubtless historic. 
 He went there with Lionel Johnson. She spoke 
 of dancing with Benjamin Disraeli, and referred 
 to " Young Mr Disraeli " and " Young Mr Glad- 
 stone." 
 
 The Rev. Father Gray, apart in a life that 
 necessarily cares little for the things of this world, 
 will, I trust, forgive Ernest Dowson 's references 
 to him. As priest he has perhaps long ago out- 
 soared London. Besides, Dowson was much 
 attached to him after all. 
 
 Can it be that I had been trying to induce 
 my poet to read Herbert Spencer ? I think not. 
 The Spenser volume must have been an Edmund 
 Spenser, the poets' poet, but it is strange to reflect 
 that, if so, he had not a copy of the '' Faery 
 Queene " in his own possession. He had not 
 many books apparently at any time, and though 
 he was a busy reader, he was curiously incurious 
 about many departments of literature and 
 erudition. 
 
 His lack of German was troublesome. I wanted 
 him to translate Heine and other modern Teuton 
 poets into English for the late Professor Buchheim, 
 but he writes : 
 
THE LETTERS 75 
 
 '* Caro Mio, — I return your letter with abund- 
 ant thanks for the offer. Alas ! that it should be 
 so, but my knowledge of German is so limited that 
 I should be an encumbrance rather than an aid, 
 if I accepted it I could only translate Heine from 
 French translations, and that is scarcely what 
 your friend would desire. And where would 
 appreciation of the Heinesque style come in ? I 
 am afraid you must pass on this attractive 
 opportunity to some one more competent." 
 
 On " February 10 ? 1893 " he wrote to me again 
 once more in search of an employment. The 
 letter is one of the very few to me that he ever 
 dated, and even then the " 10 " is queried. He 
 used business paper, and seemed in a strenuous 
 mood. We have all the dimensions of his dock 
 in the top left-hand corner. 
 
 '' Cher Vieux, — Yesterday an advt. in The 
 Times was sent me, for a librarian, in a Public Free 
 Library (under the Public Library Acts) ... I 
 have been advised to apply for this, I fear, not very 
 desirable post, and I have thought that if you, with 
 your official signature of Librarian . . . could 
 give me a testimonial, I might stand some chance. 
 Could you consider me then, in a short missive 
 a competent person to hand out dime novels to 
 transpontine shop boys ? You might mention 
 that I have a knowledge of French and Italian ; 
 and in fact — make the most of me. 
 
76 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 ''The office is really * librarian and secretary' : 
 and not more than three testimonials are to be sent 
 in. A proviso that some experience of a public 
 library is required rather handicaps me, but it is 
 worth trying for — ^£i6o and an unfurnished 
 apartment on the premises. I write to Sayle for 
 another testimony, and for my third shall try and 
 secure a word from some city functionary as to my 
 business capacities. T. a t. 
 
 " (Signed) Ernest Dowson. 
 
 " Alas ! that I should have to write to you again 
 so speedily in such a matter : this is truly descent 
 from the clouds. Ma che vuole ? one must 
 exist." 
 
 It is melancholy to reflect on the great army 
 of brilliant men who have spent anxious hours 
 in their youth endeavouring to obtain positions 
 and regular pay. The very culture of such men 
 stands in their way, and this is a point they find 
 it hard to understand. Yet one cannot imagine 
 Dowson tied to the airless occupation he here 
 proposed to himself. He would have wearied of 
 it in a very short time. That he was businesslike 
 and methodical when he liked is, however, proved 
 by such letters as this. Indeed, poets are not the 
 entire dreamers that they are popularly supposed 
 to be. The very meticulousness required in 
 minding and measuring iambics and especially in 
 writing blank verse — that most difficult of tasks — 
 
THE LETTERS 77 
 
 presupposes very much the same set of qualities 
 as are required in affairs or in the prosaic paths of 
 science and research. 
 Later he writes : 
 
 " Very many thanks, indeed, for the testimony. 
 I had your benevolent document with the others 
 type-copied and sent them off yesterday, the 
 latest possible day. I cut out a comment upon 
 my German proficiency from yours, for alas ! my 
 knowledge of that difficult but dear tongue is 
 too rudimentary to be mentioned. I do not, for 
 the rest, attach very much importance to the 
 matter, for I am afraid it is too substantial [!] 
 to be attainable. It is just worth applying for 
 however, and in any result, I am infinitely 
 obliged to you. . . . I cannot write a line of any 
 kind just now : why, I know not." 
 
 Would this kind of regular work have saved 
 poor Ernest Dowson's life ? It is a question 
 whether he would ever have tolerated the con- 
 ditions of the career which he proposed to himself. 
 There are erudite librarians, who, in the long run, 
 grow sick of the faces of their books and cry with 
 Solomon " of the making of books there is no 
 end." One dear old gentleman confessed that he 
 made regular war on what he called " those 
 rubbishy ancient tomes," and assured me that he 
 had burnt numbers of enormities (medical) pub- 
 lished in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And 
 
78 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 another eminent man, not a librarian, but so 
 well known that one may not write his name at 
 large, tells me that he regularly burns a volume 
 every evening of his life, as the seventeenth- 
 century editors said, " to prevent the dis- 
 semination of false reports," or, as he phrases it, 
 " error/' 
 
 But I did once succeed in getting my friend a 
 post of sorts. There appeared an advertisement 
 in The Athenceum, I think, calling for a brilliant 
 pen, wielded by a man of high social connections. 
 I interviewed the editor, and was almost chosen 
 myself, having proved my social connections and 
 my pen to the top of my bent. The editor, who 
 very properly valued blood and brilliancy with 
 the pen, was a mystic, and, like Hermotimus, had 
 spent much time outside the portals of his earthly 
 tabernacle. He, at that first interview, told me 
 that he had been to India in one night and 
 thoroughly knew the look of it, and the feel of it. 
 I envied him, for all our innumerable Anglo-Indian 
 friends are always very silent on the matter of 
 their long sojourns in that mysterious gorgeous 
 East ! 
 
 " Oh for the joy that might have been. 
 Oh for the joy that shall not be, 
 And that which thou hast never seen. 
 And that which thou mayst never see ! '-- 
 
 Ernest Dowson joined the staff of the journal, 
 a weekly of some dimensions, as assistant editor. 
 
THE LETTERS 79 
 
 and contributed certain admirable papers thereto, \ 
 notably " The Cult of the Child." But he severed 
 his connection with it before very long. 
 
 It is as an adorer of childhood that his lovers 
 and friends, who have kept his memory green, will 
 best remember him ! 
 
 All this happened in 1893, a period when his 
 myth, as well as Aubrey Beardsley's, was in 
 process of formation. By the American Mr 
 Talcott Williams, and 7nutatis mutandis, by Mr 
 "HN Arthur Symons the melancholy or lurid myth of 
 Ernest Dowson will inevitably be perpetuated. 
 ** Born in 1867, he died in 1900, having thrown 
 away his life in such reckless and foolish dissipa- 
 tion as comes to few — Dowson had the best of life 
 before him, and chose the worst. Nor is there 
 aught which furnishes excuse for this in the brief 
 life prefaced by Arthur Symons." 
 
 By " prefaced " one understands " written as 
 preface " : otherwise I should have been tempted 
 to say I do not know what Mr Arthur Symons 
 wrote as introduction to his classical life of Ernest 
 Dowson in " The Collected Poems of Ernest 
 Dowson " (1909). But I rejoice in the knowledge 
 that, so far as Ernest Dowson is concerned, the 
 American critic has been " side-tracked." Dowson, 
 as Mr Edgar Jepson rightly protests, was not " an 
 unpleasant sort of wastrel." 
 
 I failed to make my friend a colleague in 
 librarianship, but we were colleagues for a moment 
 in journalism, for the very day that I received my 
 
8o ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 first appointment as an academic librarian in 1890, 
 I was also appointed editor of a small society 
 weekly. There are few moments of pure joy in 
 the life of the average scholar and gentleman, 
 who has to pay income-tax on a war footing while 
 his acquaintances play at Fabianism, but I shall 
 never forget my joy in at once resigning this 
 editorship, my pride, my glowing conceit, as of 
 the dear old Pharisee who was not as other men are, 
 or the dear old Quaker who had never committed 
 a sin and wondered to my mother why people 
 made such a fuss about their sins. They must 
 be posing — ^those people ! As well talk about 
 their hats ! 
 
 Ernest Dowson, on his side, failed to make me 
 a much-read poet, though such was his modesty 
 that for long ere the publication of his " Verses " 
 we had discussed a joint production, the title of 
 which exercised us considerably. I suggested 
 ** Vine-leaf and Violet," and he wrote the intro- 
 ductory lines, the MS. of which I hold in my hand 
 at this moment. The search for pretty and 
 rather absurd titles was more fashionable twenty 
 years ago than now. Our discussions ended in 
 nothing, and " Vine-leaf and Violet " figures as 
 '* A Coronal with His Songs and Her Days to 
 His Lady and to Love." It is an honourable, 
 if thrifty, final destination. Lionel Johnson 
 perhaps was to have been a third collaborator 
 with us. Hence, possibly, the following letter, 
 which may, however, refer to the Rhymers' Book. 
 
THE LETTERS 8i 
 
 " Cher Vieux, — Do you like the enclosed verses 
 enough to include them in the Book in lieu of 
 ' Benedictio Domini ' ? Johnson, to whom I have 
 conveyed the weighty packet, seems to like them 
 the best of my budget. He was very amiable and 
 we drank much absinthe together, I vote for six 
 of your poems with much difficulty for I liked all 
 so much that I wished to see them all included. 
 I placed the ' Cinerarium,' ' Breton Beggar ' and 
 * Nejnun ' first. Of L. J.'s I think I most admired 
 the ' Cavalier and Mystic' Verlaine is after all 
 still in London. I am dining with Home and 
 Home Pere at the Constitutional to-night to meet 
 him. So that if I have the courage I will even 
 suggest to the master that he should honour his 
 disciples with a visit to the Cheese. ,. A bientot — 
 with all amenities to mesdames votre mere et votre 
 femme et a cette chere Bebe. T. a toi. 
 
 " {Signed) Ernest Dowson." 
 
 Pray, courteous reader, do not accuse me of 
 vanity because I recopy this letter in full. 
 Believe me, I am in no wise anxious to hook 
 myself on to the skirts of the great, but since the 
 great, whose myth is forming so portentously, 
 wrote thus to me, I desire only to show matters in 
 their then proportions. 
 
 In the years of the formation of the Dowson 
 myth, which has now grown half diabolic, the poet 
 was modest, charming, a boy. The Devil, a spirit 
 of imperfect education, a rebel angel who had 
 
X 
 
 82 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 refused to go through the mill, threw his shadow 
 over our beloved poet's fame. And we, who are 
 on the side of the Angels, refuse to give him up to 
 the Demon, and shall die, some of us, still con- 
 testing the Dowson myth. 
 
 O my dear poet, would that you were back 
 here to-night — would that you were back here, 
 with musing eye and queer customary cigar, 
 forcibly to repudiate some at least of those who 
 have no right to abuse Davy Garrick ! Alas, 
 what a niche you are filling — a second Chatterton. 
 The young fellows gaze on your friend as " the 
 man who knew Dowson." It is a case of Brown- 
 ing's " Death in the Desert," or '* Did you once see 
 Shelley plain ? " One has even heard of a 
 *' Dowson Club " being formed of late years. 
 
 On the back of the letter last quoted is the MS. 
 of the incomparable, the beautiful " Supreme 
 Unction," than which perhaps no better poem has 
 been written since. It is signed simply " E. D.," 
 by him who had asked : " Do you like the enclosed 
 verses enough to include them in the Book ? " 
 Wonderful ! 
 
THE LETTERS 
 
 III 
 
 He made a dash down to us when we were staying 
 at Haslemere in March and April, 1893. He 
 writes : 
 
 " I hope you will not be too surprised with my 
 audacious wire. I was meaning to stay on in 
 town until Sunday at any rate, but my foreman's 
 youngest boy died here suddenly last night and 
 the air is so depressing that 1 determined to go 
 at once. ... I cannot stay any longer in this 
 atmosphere of dreariness and tears." 
 
 It was Easter time, and on a hillside covered 
 with dry bracken we sat in hot premature sun- 
 shine, and he read me Browning, especially */ The 
 Grammarian's Funeral " and 
 
 *- Where the many-tinted end of sunset smiles. '- 
 
 . I An enthusiast for Browning's shorter poems, he 
 indoctrinated me. 
 
 ' Ernest Dowson in the country was a delight. 
 Seeing an innocent newt walking out slowly on the 
 
84 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 sandy road on the way to Professor Tyndall's 
 house with its strangely blocked-out view of the 
 adjoining dwelling and grounds, he announced with 
 horror that the newt was a serpent, and arming 
 himself with a large stake, which he kept in his 
 hand for the remainder of the walk, he proceeded 
 to belabour the little creature, which ended by 
 being banged down, quite unscathed, in the deep 
 sand... He made me get another stick in case we 
 met more dangerous reptiles. 
 
 At night, howevei, he really shone, for at our 
 picnicky supper, he cooked an excellent dish of 
 eggs in the Italian manner with oil, and with sage 
 gathered in the little garden. To the poor little 
 boy's death at the Dock we owed a delightful, 
 artless glimpse of the poet making holiday. 
 
 His next letter contains matter for controversy, 
 since anyone who remembers the Jubilee decora- 
 tions of 1887 — the tossing bower of roses, for 
 instance, into which St James's Street was turned 
 and the soft glow of numberless Chinese lanterns 
 — and then compares the illuminations of Jubilee 
 night with the hard gaseous excess on the Seine 
 bridges on the centennaire night of the French 
 Revolution in i88g, cannot but decide in favour of 
 poor old London. 
 
 (July, 1893.) 
 " I have been a wreck of this hot weather and 
 of this base city's base outburst of snobbish 
 sycophancy. London on a gala day, when one 
 
THE LETTERS 85 
 
 thinks of what Paris and Florence can manage, 
 makes me think of an ugly, fat, vulgar old woman 
 putting on the graces of coquetry :'|o,ne wants to 
 hide one's face in one's hands. You are fortunate 
 to be out of it. It is not all over, yesterday was as 
 objectionable as Thursday. I daresay it will be 
 all right on Monday, and then I may hope once 
 more to be in a reasonably good temper : the last 
 three days have severely tried it. I shall think 
 of you filling your green book on a mossy bank, O 
 founder of the Haslemere school. Hillier ran down 
 and lunched here t'other day on his way from the 
 Lakes ... he has a cottage without a name in 
 a pathless wood : so I fear we shall never see him 
 
 again. was very ebullient all the week, 
 
 and yesterday evening was sober for the first time 
 since they began to put up the decorations. . . . 
 If London increases in heat and aridity I suppose 
 I shall have to retire from it for a brief space, but 
 
 I shall hold on as long as I can. In matters 
 
 progress as well as I suppose they are likely to — 
 I should think so probably if I had the great grace 
 of patience ; not possessing that, I die many 
 deaths daily. Let me hear from you some day, 
 and especially that you and your folk . . . are 
 laying in copious stores of health. I shall probably 
 bore you from time to time with my letters." 
 
 They were letters, indeed, which never bored, 
 but were waited for impatiently by their recipients. 
 I am sure I speak for a whole circle. E[e closes the 
 
86 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 following missive with a quotation from, I think, 
 Thomas Gray's correspondence, which at that 
 time he read constantly. 
 
 " Cher Vieux, — How are you all finding 
 yourselves, and where ; and when are we going to 
 meet again ? The whirligig of time has taken 
 my people to world's end, which is called by 
 the sublunary ' Chad well Heath ' — and there, I 
 suppose, for the present I must pass penitential 
 Sundays with much regret for your ancient, 
 hospitable supper-table. 
 
 '* I suppose you are away from town : most 
 people are, I think, now. I have had a prolonged 
 epistolary paralysis or I would have afflicted you 
 with a letter before. In fact I have only just 
 reminded myself to-day that Greene's letter 
 demanding rhymes is still unanswered and likely 
 to remain so. But I am trying to hunt up the 
 necessary half dozen and will dispatch them : 
 though I should think the Star Chamber will have 
 decided by this time to dispense with me. The 
 weather is — ^well, too damned hot to write about 
 for fear of burning the paper with expletives. I 
 imagine you in Devonshire, drinking cider, playing 
 skittles and eating cream du pays. Write to me 
 and assure me that this is so, or if not that you are 
 at [home] and will look in upon me here one 
 afternoon . I am verily, I believe , ' alone in London . ' 
 The darkness of the unknown has swallowed up 
 Hillier, the provincial stage Marmie. ... I do 
 
THE LETTERS 87 
 
 not even attempt to write any longer, not even 
 verses. My mental horizon doesn't extend 
 beyond cooling drinks and cigarettes. Forgive 
 this tedious letter. It is too hot to write letters : 
 but on the other hand they are the only literature 
 that is light enough for one to read — so I may 
 conclude with an apt enough citation from a 
 prince of letter writers though a most vile poet — 
 (face Matthew Arnold !) 
 
 " ' To be tiresome is the privilege of old age 
 and absence ; I avail myself of the latter and the 
 former I have anticipated. If I do not speak to 
 you of my own affairs, it is not from want of con- 
 fidence, but to spare you and myself. My day is 
 over — what then ? I have had it. To be sure I 
 have shortened it ; and if I had done as much by 
 this lettei, it would have been as well ! ' " 
 
 At the end of August he writes again : 
 
 " Caro Vecchio, — I am glad you have been to 
 Greene, you will be able to make my peace with 
 him. I sent off versicles of a sort to him before 
 I left town — perhaps you saw them there — 8 in 
 all. ... I have been reading ' Many Inventions.* 
 Mulvaney's stories, above all ' Love o' Women,' 
 like me most : apres — ' One View of the Question,' 
 a beautiful piece of satire on English mob- 
 worship. . . . We have received the last proofs of 
 Comedy of Masks. I have seen no one — suppose 
 every one away." 
 
 i^ 
 
88 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 The other half of the " we," who with him 
 received last proofs, is, of course, his oldest 
 friend, Mr Arthur Moore, collaborator in those 
 exquisitely composed novels, of which Mr Moore 
 is said by Mr Herbert Home to have written 
 alternate chapters. Collaboration is assuredly the 
 supreme test of friendship and long-suffering. 
 
 On the birth of my daughter, on 2nd September 
 1893, he wrote to me the following pretty letter, and 
 headed it '* Cressa ne careat alba Dies ! " ^ — which 
 is a reminiscence and a misquotation of Horace. 
 
 '' My Dear Victor, — Your letter filled me with 
 joy — ^with its double news. I send my very sincere 
 congratulations, and all good wishes for the con- 
 tinued prosperity of the Bambina and the speedy 
 recovery of the Donna. 
 
 The patronising saint of Sept. 2 according to 
 the Roman calendar is St Stephen of Hungary — 
 (St Etienne) — of whom I know not much. But 
 in a Milan calendar I find the day set apart to a 
 certain San Mansueto — of whom I know less — 
 that is nothing — but whose name is excellently pro- 
 pitious. My compliments then to Mdlle. Etienne- 
 Mansueta Plarr. I append certain versicles pseudo- 
 i8th-cent. with which she has already inspired 
 me : may she be provocative of many more.'' 
 
 There follow his well-known lines, which are 
 perhaps his sole venture in the manner of Pope, 
 whom, however, he greatly admired : — 
 
 ^ "Cressa ne careat pulchra dies nota," Carm., Lib. I. 36. 
 
THE LETTERS 89 
 
 Mark the day white on which the Fates have smiled : 
 
 Eugenio and Egeria have a child, 
 
 On whom abundant grace kind Jove imparts 
 
 If she but copy either parent's parts. 
 
 Then, Muses ! long devoted to her race 
 
 Grant her Egeria's virtues and her face ; 
 
 Nor stay your bounty there, but add to it 
 
 Eugenio's learning and Eugenio's wit ! " 
 
 The poem is the kind of impromptu that is 
 written in the course of a letter, for it contains 
 three erasures, but it is truly an exquisite compli- 
 ment, from which all possibility of self-glorifica- 
 tion on the part both of subject and dedicatees 
 has been withdrawn now that it has been more 
 than once reprinted without their names. One 
 line is even cited by a writer, evidently not too 
 conversant with Latin, to show that Dowson 
 doted on the colour white ! 
 
 It is a question whether it is more chastening 
 for the literary to find that their estate in a famous 
 poet's poem has been reft away from them or to 
 discover that a bantling of their own brains has 
 become anonymous though printed as a *' Little 
 Prose Classic for Children." However, it is a 
 comfort to reflect that suppressions and passings- 
 over, which are akin to malice, can be set right 
 in memoirs, or, better still, in library catalogues, 
 which are forms of literature meant for posterity. 
 
 We were, of course, greatly touched by the 
 lines, though one could have wished that a more 
 Dowsonian metre had been adopted than the easily 
 
90 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 written eighteenth - century couplet. Likewise, 
 I was a little tickled at the thought that a baby, 
 a descendant of generations of Huguenots, of a 
 vVorshipper of the Goddess of Reason during the 
 Terreur, and of a sceptical French savant, should 
 have been even tentatively named after a saint in 
 a Milan calendar. A grandfather and again his 
 grandfather would have turned in their graves 
 had the child been christened according to the dear 
 poet's orders. One of them at least would have 
 wished for such grand old eighteenth-century 
 family names as Maria Salome, Maria Margaretta, 
 Amalia Franziska, and Frederica ! 
 
 I did not point this out to the poet, but I think 
 I did point out to him that to many of us in England 
 it brings back the memory of Omdurman and to 
 many more in France that of a national tragedy. 
 " Sedan ! " how well the baby's father and aunt 
 had had that word driven into their childish brains 
 when, as little creatures, in a beautiful wild forest 
 near Sainte Odile in the Vosges, they saw one of 
 their elders stop to talk to two ragged wayworn 
 men in blouses, sitting by the side of the path. 
 Men were these who rested dejectedly, with 
 drooping heads and hanging arms. They brought 
 the news of Sedan ! They could not believe the 
 thing they told. 
 
 An hour afterwards all the old brown gnarled 
 hands at the Convent of Sainte Odile were being 
 wrung by refugee peasants, by nuns and monks 
 who had been peasants in their mundane time ! 
 
THE LETTERS 91 
 
 Down there, down there, in the far vine-clad plain 
 with its Prankish memories, the plain of Alsace, 
 where Guttenberg discovered his j)rehim in the 
 wine-press, among the villages with their roman- 
 esque archways and fountains, their ancient steep- 
 roofed houses and yokes of plump somnolent 
 cream-coloured oxen, the dreaded Prussian, who 
 ate queer food and had such underbred manners, 
 would soon set his heavy-booted foot ! 
 
 Well, I have run on inordinately, but it is a 
 digression for his eye, if he can see it ! And since 
 I am launched upon a sea of egoism, I will continue 
 his letter. 
 
 '* Forgive this trifling : seriously I am very 
 pleased. Also with the prospects of the ' Doric 
 Moods.' I will still maintain that they owe their 
 good reception entirely to their merits and no whit 
 to diplomacy of Johnson's or Le Gallienne. Our 
 book is due for the 15th of this month. They have 
 just sent us a suggested design for the cover — a 
 tragic and comic mask with liberty to substitute 
 what we like — within 5 days ! ! Of course in the 
 time one can do nothing : otherwise perhaps 
 Home or Ricketts might have been requisitioned." 
 
 Later Ernest Dowson writes to '' Cher Vieux," 
 always with his accustomed modesty : 
 
 *' The Comedy of Masks appears on Friday — 
 nominally — but I see no reason now why it should 
 
92 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 be actually any further delayed. You must 
 command it from Mudie's. I tremble at the 
 prospect of being reviewed — I am painfully con- 
 scious of the innumerable blemishes and alas ! 
 the weakest points are in the first volume so that 
 I fear sleep will overcome the reviewer before he 
 reach any of our less banal passages. What fools 
 we are to write — or rather to publish ! Mercifully 
 Lionel does not review novels, and as to the opinion 
 
 of the average novel-reviewing ish animal — we 
 
 will not think of it. 
 
 " Peters has turned up in town again very 
 redolent of the States and very enthusiastic over 
 the Highlands. 
 
 " How shall you call la petite ? This will be an 
 exercise almost as difficult as the choice of a book 
 title. En passant can you suggest a name for 
 notre prochain roman, which is just half completed. 
 ' A Misalliance ' is, I fear, bad English. ' The 
 Opportunist ' occurs to me, also ' The Interlopers,' 
 but none of these is good. It's better than 
 * Masks ' we both think, but vindictive, savage, 
 spleenful, libellous almost, to the last degree. 
 Heaven knows when it will be finished." 
 
 We called " la petite " Marion among other 
 prenoms, though she has grown up to womanhood 
 a Mansueta, that name which the dear poet wished 
 her to bear. 
 
 It is strange that the remarkable and burnished 
 
THE LETTERS 93 
 
 novels of Ernest Dowson and Mr Arthur Moore 
 have been spoken of less than some of the former 
 author's writings. Ernest Dowson, indeed, began 
 to be spoken of at an early date. His first short 
 story in prose, reprinted with others in " Dilem- 
 mas " (Elkin Mathews, 1895, 1912 and 1913), 
 appeared in Temple Bar in 1888 under the title 
 " Souvenirs of an Egoist." The novels apart, 
 he never, indeed, suffered from that unmerited 
 neglect which is the portion of so many. To me 
 part of the tragedy of his life was this — that fame 
 or notoriety, which you will — warred against his 
 essential self. As a fresh boy he charmed. Then 
 came nascent literary celebrity in The Savoy and 
 elsewhere, and he rocked at its approach. That, 
 as Mr Edgar Jepson was able to observe, he was the 
 true Ernest Dowson to the end, proves that breed 
 conquered environment. The dog of race hunts 
 according to his traditions, says the French 
 adage. 
 
 He writes at about this time of being engaged 
 every evening in a week, which proves that he was 
 living a happy life and that certain troubles of the 
 spirit oppressed him not too heavily. 
 
 " The Comedy is out at last — very charm- 
 ing in its outward, visible aspect, and for the 
 rest I hope no one will discover as many 
 inward blemishes as I can. I am anxious to 
 see the Infanta — ^her names are all pretty. Has 
 she begun to show any literary tendencies yet ? " 
 
94 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 He wrote in early winter : 
 
 " Will you see the November Bookman ? . . . 
 they have made quite a creditable article of our 
 meagre biographies, although it is news to me that 
 I have been ' steadily making my way in literature.' 
 There is also a good review in it of Masks . . . 
 Is the Infanta short petticoated yet ? Or when 
 does that interesting development take place ? 
 I went down to see Marmie play at Wimbledon 
 the other day. He was an excellent Ralph 
 Nickleby in a tedious play." 
 
 Poor Dowson was no Dickensian, until the time 
 of his death, when, as Mr Sherard has put on 
 record, he began to read the master with all the 
 rapture of a literary discoverer. 
 
 " I have seen no one much except the Temple 
 folk lately and Sherard who camped out here one 
 night after a peregrination with me in the East 
 End during which, I am sorry to say, I contracted 
 a frantic cold which is still harassing me. . . . 
 Shall you be aux Rhymers to-morrow ? " 
 
 Apropos of his East End ramble withMr Sherard 
 he told me that one night he had gone out for a 
 stroll from his dock-house, and had been almost at 
 once knocked down. He awoke from insensibility 
 after some time, and found that he had been 
 robbed of his money — a very small sum. 
 
THE LETTERS 95 
 
 The thief must have felt like Rivarol's burglar, 
 who, breaking into Rivarol's escritoire, was 
 addressed by the wit with an "Ah ga, mon ami! 
 How often have I looked in there to no purpose on 
 the chance of finding a stray louis d'or ! " 
 
 Writing on 20th December 1893, he mentions 
 a meeting with Mr Edgar Jepson, the novelist, at 
 a small Rhymers' Club gathering. " Him I was 
 delighted to see again although I did not recognise 
 him, nor he me." Dowson thought the other a 
 good deal changed by his sojourn in the West 
 Indies, and speaks, in the letter, of his own coming 
 " exile in Chalons-sur-Saone or Saumur-sur-Oise." 
 He was probably then meditating a language 
 mastership abroad. 
 
 He discusses various literary matters in other 
 notes, as when he mentions a Verlaine lecture 
 promoted by Mr Herbert Home. The tickets were 
 five shillings each, and he says : 
 
 " I really think nous autres, Rimeurs, should 
 have been put on the ' Free List.' I had a 
 charming evening at the Odd Volumes last night. 
 I sat opposite Todhunter, who had three Irish 
 guests (Rolleston, Percival Graves and Standish 
 O'Grady, a charming Celt) . My Lord Mayor came 
 with a gorgeous creature to wait on him. . . . 
 There was no one else there whom I knew except 
 — by sight only — ^York Powell." 
 
 These are manifestly the phrases of a man 
 interested in existence — not yet an invalid. 
 
THE LETTERS 
 
 IV 
 
 In the spring of 1894, in an amusing letter excusing 
 himself for having intruded upon us with Mr 
 Jepson when we were entertaining a friend against 
 whom I had warned him as not being sympathetic 
 with poets, he speaks of retiring to Mr Hillier's 
 " cottage in the wood," for Easter with " LaTerre " 
 in order to put in twenty pages a day of translation 
 to make up arrears. Just then the absolutely 
 literal rendering into English of Zola's humorous 
 libel on the French peasant was engaging him daily. 
 He found the task most irksome, and he discussed 
 it with me from time to time, finally deciding to 
 render certain Rabelaisian phrases into something 
 less offensive in English — into common cleanly 
 blasphemies at least. Six of us were engaged 
 with him in translating the best known of Zola's 
 novels, and like hooked fish we struggled desper- 
 ately to escape the ultra-literal in places, but like 
 a cool trout-fisher Mr Teixeira de Mattos, our 
 brilliant chief, held us up rigorously round the 
 editorial boat, never once allowing one of us to 
 dart off into the depths of British decency for 
 which we longed. We had the fearful example 
 
 96 
 
THE LETTERS 97 
 
 of Mr Vizetelly before our eyes. He had been 
 prosecuted some years earlier for his translations 
 of " Nana " and one or two others of Zola's 
 novels, but we were enrolled as a learned group, 
 "The Lutetian Society,'' and we were writing for 
 scholars, and were protected by our manifest 
 sincerity and by prohibitive prices. 
 
 Our books as remainders drifted off finally to the 
 States, where to my horror " Nana " reappears 
 as a huge and, I am told, lavishly illustrated 
 production in " The Millionaires' Library," or some 
 such edition. The poor translator gets nothing 
 by this vast act of appropriation save annoyance 
 and nightmare. America, of course, is the 
 honestest of countries. "Was it not there that 
 George Washington '' never told a lie " ? Well, 
 well ! I wonder if " La Terre " has kept " Nana " 
 company. 
 
 Dowson writes in April : 
 
 *' Cher Vieux, — Wie gehts ? I have been so 
 overwhelmed with Zola, and also disorganised by 
 the sudden death of my housekeeper, and thrilled 
 by other things, that I have deferred all writing. 
 But I have wondered how it fared with you and 
 when we should meet. I have not done more than 
 340 pages. . . . Would you make my excuses to 
 your mother for not having answered her note, 
 and thank her for the symbolical stones according 
 to the Polish tradition. I am intensely interested 
 in every kind of that symbolism. ... I suppose 
 
98 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 you are rurally at your ease now, so far as it is 
 possible to be at your ease and translate Zola. 
 I have seen hardly anyone but Jepson, who dines 
 with me almost daily, and I fancy derives a good 
 deal of satisfaction from studying my trans- 
 parently imbecile condition. It is a great thing 
 that so delightful a person should at last have seen 
 the absurdity of living in Barbadoes. Are you 
 going to the Yellow Book dinner ? I shall, I 
 expect, but I feel that I ought to go to no dinners 
 until this p3n:amid is pulled down. I have had 
 and returned my Rhymers' proofs. They have 
 chucked my Lady's Hands, and my Terre Promise, 
 i/ in favour of two verses which I like less. Mine 
 will be a very poor show. I hope they will bind 
 the book decently this time. Are you by the way 
 an astrologer ? I begin to think that in my 
 horoscope the first fortnight in April must be 
 bound up with my fortunes very closely, critically 
 or fatally, or perilously. Let me hear from you ! 
 Are you at Blackheath next Sunday ? But even 
 if you were, the chances are against my being able 
 to leave my corvee. These be parlous times. . . . 
 How do you like the appended ? " 
 
 Then, like a rare flower springing suddenly and 
 unexpectedly in some familiar coign of garden, 
 appears the MS. of his lovely poem : " Quid 
 non speremus, amantes ? " It has been printed 
 on page 55 of his ** Verses " (1896), and is 
 dedicated to Mr Arthur Moore. In the letter it 
 
THE LETTERS 99 
 
 is dated 9th April 1894, for he dated his poems, in 
 most cases, and, for his friends, wrote them out 
 meticulously as they afterwards appeared in print. 
 
 " As man aspires and falls, yet a soul springs 
 Out of the agony of flesh, at last ; 
 So love, that flesh enthralls, shall rise on wings 
 Soul-centred when the rule of flesh is passed." 
 
 I am no astrologer, and could not then have 
 foretold my friend's death, so full was he of 
 interest in life. He died — not in April — but on 
 2ist February 1900, refusing, as it were, to live 
 beyond the decade which has been somewhat 
 arbitrarily assigned to him. But there is a pathos 
 in this early reference to a month being bound up 
 " critically or fatally " with his fortunes. 
 
 Of his work as a translator much has been 
 written. It was forced work — not his best. His 
 "Terre," for instance, is pot-boiler achievement. 
 Nor do I care for other pieces, such as "The Girl 
 with the Golden Eyes,'' which reappears now and 
 then in booksellers' windows — Balzac wrote the 
 original as a pot-boiler — together with Dowson 
 MSS., valued at a guinea apiece. What a supreme 
 mockery ! During both their lives, latterly, the late 
 Mr Leonard Smithers is said to have paid the poet 
 thirty shillings a week for all the work he could do 
 for him, including a large amount of corvee trans- 
 lation. When, if ever, the Judgment Books are 
 unrolled, it is not the East End sweated women 
 who will have the first say, but rather the 
 
100 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 plagiarised and pirated authors, the translators, 
 the poor scholars, in the leash of the illiterate and 
 the vulgar ! What an army they will form ! 
 
 Late in the summer of 1894 we were at Sandgate 
 in Kent, and there the poet, accompanied by an 
 accomplished editor, visited us from Saturday to 
 Monday. We bathed in the sea, and, there being 
 a great run on the bathing-machines, were forced 
 to occupy one conjointly. Dear old Ernest Dowson 
 was no hero in the water, and I retain a distinct 
 recollection of his clinging to the wheel of the 
 machine, while the chopping waves broke over him, 
 and he kept his head up pathetically, well out of 
 their reach. A wind blew that hot morning, and 
 re-entering our narrow dressing-room before the 
 others had done bathing, I was surprised by a great 
 grey fluttering of scapularies on every vantage 
 point of the hanging garments ! I was reminded 
 of this, of late years, in the crypt of that old 
 chapel at Warwick where generations of the 
 famous local noble line lie stacked on shelves, 
 coffined amid much greyness and many cobwebby 
 flappings. Sir Walter Scott, by the by, urged his 
 son's wife to visit the Warwick chapel, but did he 
 think of the crypt ? 
 
 In the afternoon the poet was so much himself 
 that we actually " walked on the Leas " at 
 Folkestone among the conventional throng. I 
 remember he knew all about a professonial beauty 
 there promenading with a stockbroker. It was 
 more than I did. 
 
THE CRISIS 
 
 So far my friend had been happy enough, and 
 though, of late months, his week-end visits to us 
 had been becoming fewer — ^for I remember that 
 the imagined intrusion with Mr Jepson marked 
 a rather rare occasion — our intercourse had been 
 kept up fairly well. But, in the latter months of 
 1894, and throughout 1895, troubles and tragedies 
 began to accumulate, though in the absence of 
 notes and documents I am now not too sure of 
 dates. 
 
 Pathologically speaking, my poor friend was 
 doomed to die of phthisis. That disease runs a 
 course of some six years. He died in 1900, and 
 already in 1894 it seemed to have got him in its 
 clutches. His nervousness in the sea may have 
 been due to ill health, and we have more than once 
 read of his very severe colds, which he shook off 
 with difficulty. He had never taken much care of 
 himself. The uncomfortable nights on sofas, the 
 unwise and innutritions dinners he ate, his fond- 
 ness for fantastic vigils — all these were contributory 
 causes of his final malady. As to vigils, I remember 
 introducing him to Lionel Johnson, when the 
 latter first came to town. They sat up in my 
 rooms till a late hour, and then, entranced with 
 
 lOI 
 
102 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 one another's conversation, went off to Johnson's 
 chambers, where they sat up all night. Again, 
 on a visit with him to Cambridge, he insisted on 
 keeping an all-night vigil in Mr Sayle's garden. 
 I heard my friends' voices till the small hours, 
 when I fell asleep. And now Mr Arthur Moore 
 tells me that when they first met, at Queen's 
 College, Oxford, in 1886 or 1887, they too watched 
 the whole night out. 
 
 But there were psychological causes, too. His 
 father and mother, restlessly wandering from home 
 to home, ended by taking up their abode at Lea, 
 in Kent, where the poet had been born. He used 
 to walk over Blackheath to see us. On one 
 occasion I remember seeing his mother saying 
 good-bye to him and flitting away, a shadowy 
 figure, near a little grove of trees that fronted our 
 house. She would not visit her son's friends — 
 there was evidently trouble in the air. 
 
 Of the sudden deaths of the poet's father and 
 mother I am expressly forbidden to write, and 
 can only state here that the one shock following 
 at no long interval of time upon the other shook 
 him to the roots of his being. 
 
 I trust I am guilty of no indiscretion when I say 
 that the old dock had latterly been a great source 
 of trouble. The poet told me of a mortgage, for 
 no very great amount, it is true, and of the fore- 
 man being the looming creditor, who could only 
 have been paid off if prosperity had returned to 
 the Thames after the dock strikes. 
 
THE CRISIS 103 
 
 I never could discover how Ernest Dowson 
 settled with this man after his father's death. 
 I have an idea that, growing utterly sick of his 
 business troubles, he simply shut the dockyard 
 gate behind him, and, like Tolstoy, sought by this 
 simple process to disembarrass himself of real 
 estate, cobwebbed over by deeds and liabilities. 
 His affairs remain a mystery to this day, though 
 I am told he need never for a moment have been 
 in need of funds. The dock, as Mr Arthur Moore 
 tells me, was certainly sold, in 1898 perhaps. 
 
 Other troubles fell upon him. His bright young 
 brother, so he told me, then grown almost to man's 
 estate, met with failure in Canada — the fate of 
 so many gentlemen's sons. He walked huge 
 distances — met with numberless adventures. And 
 now his cousin, Mr Gerald Hoole, writing from 
 the Isle of Skye in February, 1914, has informed 
 me that Rowland died of phthisis in America 
 now more than a year ago. The hereditary com- 
 plaint has thus taken both brothers, and a whole 
 lovable family is swept away into the world of 
 memories. 
 
 And then the love affair ! We will cut a long 
 story short by saying simply — it failed. 
 
 Consumption induces the feverish spes phthisica 
 of the old physicians : it heightens the appetites 
 that prey upon the wasted body. The elder 
 Mr Dowson, who had the story from Severn, told 
 me that this was so in the case of Keats. 
 
 I am not '' out " to detract from Ernest Dowson, 
 
104 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 but to defend. If, later on, he erred, he did so 
 under an accumulation of griefs worthy of the 
 ^ old Greek tragedies. In small families strokes of 
 Fate fall heavily even on the Philistine, but when 
 they rain on the frail, the exquisitely feeling, the 
 imaginative, the very loving, and the unstable, 
 they crush. 
 
 The beginning of the days of confirmed ill 
 health and prolonged mental suffering is perhaps 
 indicated in a phrase which occurs in a note 
 dated from 6 Featherstone Buildings, High 
 Holborn. This apparently was the first station 
 in the poet's via dolorosa by way of Paris and 
 Brittany to the last phase at Catford under 
 Mr Sherard's roof. He chose Featherstone 
 Buildings, I believe, because of poor Chatterton's 
 supposed residence ^ there long ago. He writes 
 of his ''abominable procrastination," and says: 
 
 " My excuse for not having come to you on the 
 Sunday I daresay you will find equally inexcusable 
 but it was simply because I was in such a state of 
 nervous and physical disability that I had not the 
 •faintest recollection of having any engagement. . . . 
 I expect to be in this country, much as it tortures 
 and maddens me, till Christmas or the New Year." 
 
 That New Year must have been the first day of 
 1896. " E. D. went to Paris," writes Mr Arthur 
 Moore (3rd February 1914), " with Norreys Connell 
 1 Chatterton died in Brooke Street, Holborn. 
 
THE CRISIS 105 
 
 in December 1895. ... It was very near the time 
 of Verlaine's death/ 'which occurred on 8th January 
 1896. The two authors lived for a time at 
 No. 214 Rue St Jacques. Early in 1896 Ernest 
 Dowson went to Pont-Aven and stayed for some 
 months, Mr Moore joining him for a fortnight in 
 August. Of the poet's life in Brittany I give some 
 account in the following chapter. 
 
 It should be mentioned here that he was in 
 Dieppe in the summer of 1895, and that, though 
 troubles had rendered him silent as a correspondent, 
 he was still able to live among civilised people, of 
 whom many, including the late Mr Conder, and 
 several artists and their wives, and others, were 
 then in the ancient town. Mr Arthur Moore 
 visited him, and saw him again when he removed 
 to Arques, the quaint village near the prim forest 
 of that name, and the old romantic chateau. 
 
DOWSON IN BRITTANY 
 
 " I THINK he was happiest in the remote Breton 
 villages/ whither he now and again withdrew 
 himself, from which he wrote his most delightful 
 letters. They used to give me the impression that 
 the world went well with him there — as well, at 
 any rate, as it ever could go with him." 
 
 So wrote Mr Edgar Jepson in his just account of 
 ''The Real Ernest Dowson," published, as I have 
 mentioned before, in The Academy, in November 
 1907. 
 
 Brittany was to Ernest Dowson what Ireland 
 was to Lionel Johnson. Both poets found in those 
 dilapidated delightful countries what cities and 
 orderly champaigns do not supply to the spirit of 
 the timid, the imaginative and, in Johnson's case, 
 the retrospective and religious. 
 
 "Bridge Dock, Limehouse, E. 
 "June 13/92. 
 " C. Dowson and Son. 
 '* Telegraphic Address : 
 
 "Dowson, Limehouse. 
 " MoN CHER Victor, — I hope you will consider 
 the Breton journey seriously : Moore, I am sure, 
 would be very charmed. In case you decide upon 
 
 ^ The poet knew Brittany well. He went a walking tour 
 there in the summer of 1890 with Mr A. C. Hillier, to whom 
 I introduced him. 
 
 106 
 
DOWSON IN BRITTANY 107 
 
 it I send you a sort of itinerary which you may find 
 useful, although you will very likely vary it." 
 
 There follows the clearest possible plan of a tour 
 right round " old black Brittany/' which we 
 adhered to religiously on our wedding journey 
 and greatly enjoyed. 
 
 Dowson had never visited Carnac, and, in a kind 
 of blind obedience to him, we missed that great 
 druidic relic, but we went to Scaer, which he had 
 perhaps not visited either, and, under the guidance 
 of old M. Yves Rodallec, Flaubert's host, saw the 
 wonderful three-days ''Pardon," with its wrest- 
 ling, gavotte-dancing, and incomparable costumes 
 from many villages. I have never seen such 
 costumes, even in Alsace, and am told that they 
 are not discarded yet. But since my informants 
 did not know the country in 1892, 1 cannot rightly 
 estimate the value of their evidence. Certain it is 
 that the Picards have abandoned what costume 
 they had in 1883, when, at Ault, on the coast, the 
 little girls appeared at mass in a garb exquisite in 
 its old-world simplicity. 
 
 " Through deepening dusk one just can see 
 
 The httle white-capped heads that move 
 In time to Unes turned rhythmically 
 And starred with names of love." 
 
 In 1897 the little '' lint-haired girls " wore 
 wretched sailor hats, shabby frocks, and looked for 
 all the world like our own Board School children. 
 
io8 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 How strange it is that the populace in its ascent 
 sheds off its hereditary graces as so many marks 
 of bondage ! In England, and still more in the 
 land of Mrs Wiggs's cabbage-patch, Demos has 
 made itself unutterably ugly. The disastrous 
 little cricketing cap worn by our old cottage wives 
 is an approximation to costume, for it is likely to 
 become stereotyped, but how compare it with the 
 many-shaped and wonderfully laundered coiffes of 
 the Breton women ? They are best, I think, at Dol, 
 but admirable everywhere. In Scotland, the 
 quaint old men's "bonnets" have given way to 
 the odious -and all-pervading "cloth cap." The 
 "bowler " reigns in Italy. In Alsace, however, you 
 still see the fine old noble dress, the huge archaic 
 bows, black in token of a long mourning. A 
 year ago, in September 1913, when I came down 
 from the top of the cathedral, where I had been 
 sitting three hundred feet up, among the little 
 late Gothic figures of a shouting bear, a praying 
 lady and a burgher, all gazing upwards to the 
 aerial summit with its cross, there met my gaze 
 a group of stolid little peasant girls, thick-booted, 
 darkly dressed, holding in sunburnt hands huge 
 disproportionate umbrellas, with, on top of all, 
 the vast august black bows of the Alsacienne. 
 They stood against the fretted red-sandstone wall, 
 waiting, grave-eyed, for their friends to join them 
 before going afoot into the long flat stretches of the 
 Plaine, among the maize crops, the vineyards and 
 the tobacco fields. Peasants are Mediaeval people; 
 
DOWSON IN BRITTANY 109 
 
 they choose immemorial places of rendezvous. 
 They either have no watches or their watches, of 
 a turnip pattern, do not go. So, doubtless, these 
 damsels had been told to meet their friends, 
 vaguely, towards the setting of the sun. It 
 mattered not that they were at the trysting-place 
 hours too early. They were, I fancy, of the 
 kindred of him who went into a bookseller's shop 
 and cried : 
 
 " I want the book ! " 
 
 " What book, sir ? " 
 
 " That sort of a little yellow book ! " 
 
 This is not so much a digression as an attempt 
 to set forth the spirit of peasantry, which is the 
 same in many countries, from the land of Tolstoi 
 or Kipling's India to Connemara. The cowboys 
 lack that spirit, by the by. '' The Virginian " 
 is not of this ancient kindred . Into the old peasant 
 spirit Dowson entirely entered in the Brittany he 
 loved so well. 
 
 '* Mon cher," I can hear him saying, '' that 
 is the tapestry that escapes me and that I never 
 weave ! " 
 
 "It is nothing wonderfull," one might have 
 made reply years ago, "but you and I see 
 differently. You are static : your figures and 
 loves are of all ages. You, in one sense, belong 
 to the age of Tibullus, Catullus, and the rest of the 
 classics. Others are little unconsidered roman- 
 ticists of the school of Longfellow. You, en 
 philosophe, suffer from the sorrows of the world : 
 
 •^ 
 
no ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 others, apart from family memories, would be 
 half consoled, on their death-beds, by, say, the 
 tune of a bag-pipe, or the sight of a corn-hopper 
 from Alsace, parti-coloured and semi-Oriental in 
 execution and design, or the memory of dancing 
 Algeriennes, or of quaint childish Bavarian women, 
 dancing, too, in a mediaeval contre-danse, or even 
 of screeching Anamites in the Paris Exposition of 
 1889." 
 
 He would have mused, pouted out his lips, lit 
 another appalling Vevey. But, in his demeanour, 
 there would have been that sympathy which, in 
 these latter years, we miss — increasingly. 
 
 His letter continues : " I hope once more that 
 you will think of it : I am sure that you would 
 both of you be charmed with the country. The 
 formal table d'hote of Trouville, Cannes, Paris, 
 Dinan, etc., is unknown. ... I have a neuralgic 
 disorder which swells my face abominably, so that 
 unless there is a speedy improvement you will find 
 me at home in the evening soon. A hientot done." 
 
 In July, 1892, he wrote : 
 
 " Caro Vittorio Mio, — I have only just realised 
 that you are finally departed. . . . And is one 
 ever to see you again ? At any rate let me hear 
 from you speedily, and of your plans. I go to 
 Brittany a week later than was arranged. . . . 
 so there is all the more chance of our meeting. 
 We shall not be more than a week at Le Faouet, 
 
DOWSON IN BRITTANY iii 
 
 whence we proceed into quite unexplored barbar- 
 isms to the extreme west of Finisterre : but we 
 ought to run across each other, when we are 
 returning. I wish I was going under your 
 circumstances. However I must possess my soul 
 in patience. . . . 
 
 " P.S. — Even if we happen to miss in Bretagne, 
 you 7nust visit Faouet : on the left-hand side of 
 the market-place (looking East) from the Lion 
 d'Or observe the house which, whatever happen, 
 I intend to live in." 
 
 " Au Lion d'Or, Le Faouet. 
 
 " Mintiit, Wednesday (in August, 1892). 
 " Carissime, — I am charmed to hear that you 
 are in the sacred land. I also adore the granite 
 and the cathedral of Dol. Alas ! that we are just 
 leaving for that direction. We hoped that you 
 would arrive here before we left, but now you are 
 not, and at 4.0 in the morning we depart for 
 Pontivy, en route for Lamballe, etc. ... I leave 
 this note on the chance of your reaching here 
 before we meet ; but I hope that either at 
 Lamballe or Dol we may rencounter. ... If you 
 come here let me entreat you to take a rough but 
 most delightful walk up the hill opposite St Barbe. 
 When you have seen the savage beauty of the view 
 you get at about the end of the range, I hope you 
 will be as devout a Faouettois as I am. No more 
 now : we have but 3 hours' slumber. 
 
112 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 " Alas I shall be in London this day week. But 
 I shall return and live here. Some day you must 
 do likewise. 
 
 " If you have time to send your impressions of 
 this place to me, your letter will be to me even as 
 the saving draught of water to the traveller in a 
 thirsty land ! " 
 
 We " missed " in Brittany, though we reached 
 Le Faouet eventually after a memorable journey 
 in a voiture, as the little diligence of those parts 
 is still called. Le Faouet (" the beech-tree ") is 
 famous for its memories of the Chouans, who rang 
 their tocsin, calling the faithful to arms, in the 
 little hill-top belfry of Sainte Barbe. It has been 
 painted in a well-known picture. The guests of 
 the Lion d'Or were full of the recently flown 
 visitors, and the little Bretonne, who waited on us 
 in her stiff mediaeval jupe and coiffe, constantly 
 quoted Monsieur " Douzeuc," the Armorican 
 word for " twelve," which was the nearest shot 
 she could make at *' Dowson." 
 
 We heard many old stories of Chouans and 
 wolves, and eventually, travelling on through 
 Scaer and Carhaix, were one afternoon scurrying 
 along interminable roads to Morlaix, in a pre- 
 historic voiture, when we stopped to refresh our 
 driver with potato spirit in a roadside farmhouse. 
 The man who served us was a grim old long-haired 
 Breton, and he had ancient flint-lock guns on his 
 walls, which looked as if they had done service in 
 
DOWSON IN BRITTANY 113 
 
 the cause of Choiiannerie. The floor of his large 
 kitchen and living-room was of beaten earth, but 
 he possessed fine old furniture, and on the top of 
 a cupboard-bedstead reclined, in full local costume, 
 coiffe and all, a sick woman. She seemed in great 
 pain and was very pale and restless, but not much 
 notice was taken of her. 
 
 " Oui, elle est malade," the others said. Seeing 
 us, however, she reared up on her elbow — the 
 whole thing was very grim — and joined in the 
 conversation. 
 
 Strange that Monsieur et Madame were the 
 second batch of English people that they had 
 seen in their lives, and that the others had 
 appeared only about ten days before ! These 
 others had been two Englishmen, travelling in 
 an opposite direction to ours — tres presses, a ce 
 qui parait. 
 
 Owing to my liberality in the matter of potato 
 spirit, I was the grand seigneur oi the occasion. 
 I, therefore, cross-examined the poor invalid 
 carefully. 
 
 What were the travellers like ? But yes, one 
 was " carre," or was the word " trappu " ? Mr 
 Arthur Moore, whom his friends know as a well 
 set-up man, will forgive my quotation of this poor 
 invalid. Peasants have an extraordinary knack 
 of offending, without in the least meaning to do so. 
 They are always very grave, literal, and interested 
 in what they report. 
 
 The other traveller — gentlemen they manifestly 
 
 H 
 
114 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 were not, for they were afoot — " etait plus 
 chetifr 
 
 We fancied we had spotted the travellers at 
 once, and subsequently verified our guess. 
 
 Would that this could have happened some 
 years later, and that it could have been my last 
 news of my friend ! I should like to think of him 
 always as travelling off into infinity in a land of 
 primitives. At the time of this little episode, I 
 remember thinking of the Esquimaux, who told 
 the Franklin search-party that, some winters ago, 
 they had seen white men travelling by in a long 
 line, apparently hungry. 
 
 " And why did not you feed them ? " 
 
 " Because we had nothing to eat ourselves." 
 
 Once again I heard from him at the same 
 address, and then it was his last letter to me, 
 which, at the time I received it, struck me as 
 lacking in the customary cordiality. But it is as 
 kind as ever, though melancholy and valedictory. 
 With the exception of one post-card, written in 
 February, I had not heard from him for an age. 
 
 " MoN CHER ViEUX [he had then written from 
 the Hotel Gloanec, at Pont-Aven], — Many months 
 have I meant to write to you and give you of 
 my wandering news. But arriving here, after 
 passing through these Breton lands, which are so 
 associated with you, makes it incumbent on me to 
 send at least a post-card. I will follow it up with 
 
DOWSON IN BRITTANY 115 
 
 a letter when I am settled down, but write to me 
 in the meantime. I shall stay here at least a 
 month. I wish you could come too and leave 
 your fogs to bask in baking sunshine as I did this 
 afternoon, taking my coffee in an arbour in a 
 garden of my hotel at Quimperle. I feel I shall 
 do much work here : it is an adorable place and, 
 much as I love Paris, where I have lived now some 
 time, I felt rested and restored to some prospect 
 of reasonable health directly I came here. Write 
 and believe me in spite of all my short-comings 
 as a correspondent, always yours." 
 
 As one who dreads the slipping out of sight of 
 a friendship as greatly as he dreads the death of a 
 friend, I wrote at once, and tried to revive the 
 pleasant old exchanges of letters, but the sun had 
 ceased to shine for poor Ernest Dowson, and with 
 a note of pain came the final letter in May, 1896. 
 It was a shock, almost a blow, however kindly and 
 calm its phrases. 
 
 " My Dear Victor, — I am ashamed of myself 
 for not having long ago answered your charming 
 letter, from Pont-Aven, but constant ill health and 
 depression of spirits have made me a sorry corre- 
 spondent. At least, I will not go away from this 
 place, with which we both have had pleasant 
 associations, without putting myself in touch with 
 you. You will remember the room (salle a manger) 
 in which I am writing. This visit of mine has not 
 been a success ; I came up from Pont-Aven only 
 
ii6 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 two days ago, to see if the change of air — ^from 
 Pont-Aven to Faouet is really an enormous 
 change, though it may sound ridiculous to you — 
 would do me any good, and to spend a fortnight. 
 But the ineffable tristesse of the place is too much 
 for me and I am returning to what is more or less 
 my permanent home and address (Hotel Gloanec, 
 Pont-Aven, Finistere) to-morrow. Faouet is 
 charming in the daytime. One can work without 
 interruption, and, tired of work, one can bask in 
 the blazing sunshine by Sainte-Barbe. But the 
 evenings, the cold, bleak desolation of the evenings ! 
 Perhaps Pont-Aven, where I know everybody, and 
 have many friends, French, English and Breton, 
 has spoilt me ; perhaps Le Faouet has changed, 
 more likely I have. But I have not the courage 
 to stay here by myself. It is more beautiful, 
 however, now than in the full summer. There is 
 no one in either hotel. Our old friend Jeanne has 
 retired and Madame Mitouard (who asks to be 
 remembered to you) is shaky on her pins. Marie- 
 Joseph has gone to Paris. Miss or Meese Rose, 
 who spoke English, is post-mistress or tobacconist 
 at Vannes. The two little twins, whom Moore 
 and I admired much at the billiard, are grown 
 into ugly and farouches girls of twelve. And the 
 two trees, whom ( ? which) Moore christened the 
 ' Sisters Limejuice,' are cut down. Eheu fugaces ! 
 But it is probably I, who have changed, more 
 than Faouet, and doubtless if I was here with you 
 and Moore I should love the place again. But in 
 
DOWSON IN BRITTANY 117 
 
 my sick and sorry old age I begin to be dependent 
 on society : so I am off to Pont-Aven apres demain, 
 and there I hope you will write to me. 
 
 " I hope you and yours prosper. It is long since 
 I have heard news of you. My poems will be out 
 in a day or two — perhaps are out now. You 
 must forgive the freedom I have taken with yours 
 and your wife's name in my inscription to my 
 poem on Marion. I am full up with work of various 
 kinds and I suppose I ought to be satisfied with 
 myself, for it is all work that pays. But as I have 
 no lungs left to speak of, an apology for a liver, and 
 a broken heart I may be permitted to rail a little 
 sometimes. 
 
 " Write to me soon, mon Vieux. I shall be at 
 Pont-Aven for two or three months and winter 
 probably in Paris. Smith, Smithers and Moore 
 are my only regular correspondents. Johnson 
 sends me messages, with promises of speedy 
 letters, but has not written as yet since I started 
 on my wanderings. With J — I have seriously 
 quarrelled ; and I am afraid H — is annoyed with 
 me because I have published my verses out of the 
 
 series. writes to me fairly often, friendly 
 
 letters, which give me sleepless nights and cause 
 me to shed morbid and puerile tears. But she 
 is very kind. With all remembrances to all, 
 affectionately yours, 
 
 " (Signed) Ernest Dowson.'' 
 
 It was scarcely my fault that he had not heard 
 
ii8 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 from me. I had fancied that my long and urgent 
 letter of February must have bored him. Silence 
 is often a poignant rebuff to a man schooled 
 during years of youth in the endurance of neglect 
 or the reception of snubs, merited sometimes, 
 oftener imaginary, painful always ! Moreover, 
 I had not known where to write to him. To us 
 he had been becoming a mystery. Art had 
 been engulfing him, and Art is an even subtler 
 estranger than faddishness, its modern substitute. 
 
THE LAST PHASE 
 
 His book came out. It made his name as a poet. 
 It is mentioned next to mine — ^we are described 
 as Rhymers, and I am proud of the juxtaposition 
 — in Mr Ernest Rhys's ''Literary Causerie/' pre- 
 fixed to the '' Literary Year-Book " of 1897. 
 
 This first volume of " Verses " — how diffident the 
 title ! — contains all that is finest in his scanty 
 / poetic output. " Non sum qualis eram bonae sub 
 \ regno Cynarae " ^ rearrested the attention at once. 
 <! It has been rightly called of late ''the poem of 
 /■ the Decadence." Jt dates from 1891 : I have no 
 / manuscript of it, as I mentioned before. Had 
 ^ it been written after his troubles had begun to 
 thicken, it would have been a wonderful achieve- 
 ment — a swan-song." In the same volume, the 
 cover of which is adorned by a curve from the 
 pencil of Aubrey Beardsley, himself then falling on 
 evil days — a curve which Ernest Dowson spoke 
 
 ^ Hor. Car7n. Lib. IV. i. 3-4. Although in "schooldays 
 I learnt the "Odes of Horace" by heart three times, I am 
 indebted to that good scholar, my old friend, Mr Osman 
 Edwards, for the identification of Cinara. Mr Edwards 
 met Ernest Dowson at Oxford, but only remembers him 
 as "a very quiet man." 
 119 
 
120 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 of with great pride — appear all the old familiar 
 favourite poems — "Supreme Unction," ''Amor 
 Umbratilis," '' To One in Bedlam." 
 
 His second book of verse was published by 
 Leonard Smithers & Co., in^ 1899, and to me it 
 marks an extreme falling-away in the poet's 
 powers. It is full of lassitude and sorrowfulness, 
 as of a man who has done with the world and is 
 dying disillusionised. There are three prose 
 poems at the end of all, a reminiscence of the 
 admired prose poems of Baudelaire. The second 
 of them, " The Visit," cannot be read without a 
 certain shudder, for we feel, as we read it, that the 
 so sensitive poet is approaching death. 
 
 *' Then dared I open my eyes and I saw my 
 old body on the bed, and the room in which I had 
 grown so tired, and in the middle of the room the 
 pan of charcoal which still smouldered. And 
 dimly I remembered my great weariness and the 
 lost whiteness of Lalage and last year's snows ; 
 and these things had been agonies." 
 
 I imagine that I saw Ernest Dowson only twice 
 again. Once he passed me on the London pave- 
 ment. He was, it seems, coming out of the stair- 
 case to Smithers 's fiat in Arundel Street. So ill 
 and absent-minded, so pale and, to me, forbidding 
 did he look, that I could not summon up courage 
 to address him. Ciii bono ? Of course I am quite 
 wrong, but we all know this state of feeling. It 
 is useless to accuse me of being of the irritable 
 genus. I am not unduly morbid, and who does not 
 
THE LAST PHASE 121 
 
 know what it is to slacken pace behind someone 
 who has failed in cordiality towards one and has 
 seemed bored by one's advances and reminders ? 
 I had no idea that Ernest Dowson was then in 
 London or how long he would stay. He had 
 received a facial injury, easily remediable, which 
 may have partly accounted for his unwillingness 
 to revisit old and faithful friends. He was musing 
 as usual, and seemed to see nothing, his eyes 
 almost bulging from his head. He was wrapped 
 in a heavy coat and had a larger cigar than of old 
 in his mouth. I forgot the incident, which pained 
 me at the time, as such things do. 
 
 However, in July, 1897, he called on us, dined 
 and stayed the night. Hardly a word could be 
 drawn from him. He seemed frozen to stone. 
 It was dreadful. As a family we were longing for 
 sympathy, for congratulations. We had a charm- 
 ing new house ; our little child was at the pretty age 
 of five ; I had been appointed to my life's work. 
 
 He nodded wearily in reply to every question. 
 He would tell me nothing of himself. I have no sort 
 of recollection of how we got through that evening. 
 Did he go out — did he stay at home ? I forget. 
 
 Next morning I left him in my book-room. I 
 was going for the first time, if I remember 
 rightly, to visit my official Library as Librarian 
 elect. It was an exciting occasion. Would he 
 come too ? Oh no ! He waved the subject 
 aside as though he were an Indian General 
 repressing the family poet. I left him among my 
 
122 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 old books, of which he used to be so fond. At 
 about four o'clock I returned. He had smoked 
 innumerable cigarettes : they lay all around him 
 in saucers and trays. And with dreaming eyes 
 he was viewing my little child, who stood in front 
 of him and seemed puzzled by his demeanour. 
 He appeared to be looking through her, while she 
 gazed at him. It was the child whose birth he had 
 hymned. 
 
 Very shortly afterwards, he arose briskly 
 enough, borrowed a new suit of clothes, of which 
 I rarely possess an exemplar, and announced curtly 
 that he was going yachting off the coast of Ireland. 
 I congratulated him on his fashionable occupation. 
 He never smiled, seemed to be painfully repressing 
 something — he had seemed ill at ease and in a state 
 of self -repression throughout his visit — shook hands 
 briefly, in a most matter-of-fact way, left no exact 
 indication of his future whereabouts, was gone ! 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 A friend tells me that he was subject to these 
 moods. I at least had not observed them so far. 
 We never saw him again — never again heard 
 directly from him. Once, it might have been in 
 1898, Lionel Johnson, himself then entering his 
 mythic phase, for he shortly afterwards shut 
 himself up in seclusion in his chambers and grew 
 a long black beard, which I alone among men ^ 
 
 ^ His charwoman, since discovered, denies that the 
 beard was long, and refers pathetically to his perfect 
 manners. 
 
THE LAST PHASE 123 
 
 seem to have beheld — ^Lionel Johnson mentioned 
 to me that he had been meeting Ernest Dowson 
 in London and that the wandering poet had said : 
 " I have it on my conscience that I have not seen 
 the Plarrs/' This was a little balm to a sore 
 heart. Did he still suffer from his somewhat 
 comic disfigurement ? I had not noticed it in 
 July, 1897. Had he been annoyed by our slight 
 gleam of prosperity ? Surely not. For, though 
 he disliked Kensingtonians, it was the spiritual 
 rather than the local type that was not dear to 
 him. Was he ill ? He had not appeared so at 
 the time of his visit, and had vouchsafed no reply 
 to questions concerning his health. He had been 
 impenetrable — a stone. 
 
 Myths began to cluster round him. But of this 
 we are sure : Adelaide, the ** Missie '' of one of his 
 dedications, was married late in September, 1897. 
 We need only record the fact with Tacitean brevity. 
 Mr Moore went to the wedding at his earnest 
 request, carrying the poet's present. 
 
 Sunt lacrimae rerum ! 
 
 Later on, Mr Guy Thorne, who knew him very 
 well in his last period, heard him say in answer 
 to the careless query : " Ernest, were you ever in 
 love ? '' *' Vous me demandez si fai aime ; oui ! 
 c'est une histoire singuliere et terrihle ! " The words 
 were Voltaire's. 
 
 " While I live, "continues the writer in an account 
 of "The Strand of Twenty Years Ago," published in 
 T.P.'s Weekly in July, 1913, " I shall never forget 
 
124 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 his wan smile, the haunted look in the poor fellow's 
 eyes." ^ 
 
 He spent much time in Paris ; he was certainly 
 there in 1899 when '' Adrian Rome " was pub- 
 lished by Messrs Methuen & Co. I am informed 
 that a kind of rescue party was sent out to bring 
 him news of funds lying at his disposal in the 
 hands of his father's executors. He fancied 
 himself at feud with them — ^his relations. His 
 would-be rescuer found him lying in bed all day, 
 and dining, as he was perversely fond of doing, at 
 a wretched little gargotfe. He was induced by his 
 old friend to dine more handsomely. His chief 
 admiration and associate seems, according to this 
 informant, to have been the eccentric " Bibi la 
 Puree," a kind of tramp of literature, who had 
 a mania for stealing the umbrellas of celebrities. 
 If this be more than myth, it is characteristic of 
 my old fellow-commentator. He had, poor fellow, 
 apparently sunk into an extreme condition of self- 
 neglect. He carried his miser e to Dieppe in the 
 summer of 1899. 
 
 It is strange to think of him as perhaps once 
 more at the romantic Chateau d'Arques, among 
 whose ruins and in whose ancient forest he may 
 have wandered when he stayed at Arques in 1895. 
 It was his last summer now. At Arques they show 
 you the skeleton of a lady who had been immured 
 
 ^ If Mr Guy Thorne refers to the period of 1893 in this 
 and a later passage, it is curious to reflect that Dowson had 
 already passed into his last phase in some circles. 
 
THE LAST PHASE 125 
 
 in the thick wall in some dark forgotten age. 
 At the bony feet lies the skeleton of a little dog. 
 Which of them had died first ? What had been 
 their offence ? Did the poet, penned in by stony 
 destiny and drawing near his end, see them, too, 
 and what were his thoughts ? 
 
 These weird relics were shown me two years ago, 
 when out in the country for the first time after a 
 summer of illness and a drastic operation. I was 
 rejoicing in the autumn sunlight, and had I known 
 that this was where my friend perhaps last 
 wandered, how furiously I should have been given 
 to think ! 
 
 A story of his going a long expedition in the 
 Netherlands and elsewhere with Mr Norreys 
 Connell, another of his inhabiting a London flat 
 in the absence of a friend and decorating it with 
 herring-bones, and another of his enjoying a 
 short period of sartorial rehabilitation which lasted 
 about a fortnight — these may belong to this or an 
 earlier period. 
 
 After Dieppe he probably came to London. 
 He stayed for long in the Euston Road and 
 there Mr Robert Harborough Sherard found him. 
 
 To the last London period, perhaps, belongs 
 Mr Guy Thome's description of him as flitting 
 about, seemingly a lost creature, " a youthful 
 ghost strayed amongst the haunts of men. . . . 
 Pale, emaciated, in clothes that were almost 
 ragged, poor Ernest flittered [about] in search of 
 someone with whom to talk. When he found a 
 
126 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 friend, his face would light up with a singular 
 and penetrating sweetness that made one forget 
 an untidiness — to use no other word — that verged 
 upon offence." 
 
 Side by side with this passage I should like here 
 to quote Mr Edgar Jepson's appreciation : 
 
 ^ " Ernest Dowson was a dreamer with the finest 
 and most delicate sense of beauty. He was an 
 exile in this world ; and very wisely he lived 
 aloof, as far as it would let him, in the beautiful 
 world of his dreams, which he has now without 
 doubt inherited. Of externals he was utterly 
 heedless. He did not love the sordid at all ; but 
 he did pay as much attention to his appearance 
 as that stern Englishman, Dr Johnson. He was 
 simply not concerned with the world ; and I think 
 that his wonderful, gentle charm came from this 
 attitude to life. He never cared enough for this 
 world to pose before it ; he had the charm of perfect 
 simplicity and sincerity, the charm of an extra- 
 ordinary gentleness. He was always just Ernest 
 Dowson ; and it was a delightful person to be." 
 
 The friend who had gone to rescue the poet in 
 Paris met him for the last time in London. He 
 was ill and coughing, and was invited to dine at 
 a good restaurant, which was named. 
 
 " I cannot face a dinner at 's," said the 
 
 poet despairingly. 
 
 Our impressions of others are coloured by our 
 
THE LAST PHASE 127 
 
 own personalities, and I thank Mr Arthur Moore 
 for thus always remembering our friend in other 
 than lurid lights. He told me (13th January 1914) 
 that the last time he saw Ernest Dowson was 
 about two months before his death. Like myself 
 he had received very few letters from him after 
 1895. Ernest was then lodging in the Euston 
 Road. Though coughing a good deal, he did not 
 seem exceptionally ill, for ''dilapidated " he had 
 always seemed, as his friends well knew. Yet it 
 was the last phase, of which we were mostly 
 entirely unaware. 
 
 Years for us had passed after that summer day 
 in 1897. We, indeed, heard scarcely a rumour of 
 the friend, who had been so much to us and who 
 could never be out of mind. London and life are 
 full of these spiritual miseries. In the case of 
 relations, of shallow persons who have suddenly 
 risen in the world, and of those far- wandering 
 Englishmen, who write the poetry of '' Home " 
 when thousands of miles away and forget to call 
 on their oldest friends when they are here, we 
 take this kind of thing for granted. But Ernest 
 Dowson was different ! 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 One grey morning in February, 1900, I was 
 writhing in bed in the pangs of herpes zoster, 
 vulgarly known as shingles. Courteous reader, 
 avoid making a rash acquaintance with that belt 
 of fire ! My wife came into the room, and in a 
 very startled and shocked voice announced our 
 
128 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 friend's death. It was in the morning paper under 
 a sensational heading. Mr Sherard had written 
 his remarkable and much-quoted account of the 
 poet's last hours. We found ourselves included 
 in the general condemnation of the friends who 
 had let him die. Ye gods ! our doors had stood 
 open for him, our lamp had been trimmed for him 
 for years ! He had stayed many days with us in the 
 dear old seasons : why had he not died with us ? 
 
 They buried him according to the rites of his 
 Church, that knew not whom she was burying. 
 I was too ill to attend the funeral, and my wife 
 in tears went for me, accompanied by another old 
 defender, Mr Edgar Jepson. I could do no more 
 than send him a laurel wreath, my custom when 
 poets die. 
 
 In the summer the shock had been so far 
 recovered from that one was able to think of him 
 again as though the mysteries and the silences 
 had not been. In Cornwall, by the violet sea, the 
 long elegy was written which, after the lapse of 
 many years, has been in part published in Poetry 
 and Drama for June, 1913.^ And now its kind 
 readers ask me : ** Who was the young Poet ? " 
 
 O my friend, if only ours had been another kind 
 of good-bye ! 
 
 ^ " An Informal Epitaph on a Young Poet," Poetry and 
 Drama y June, 191 3. 
 
 February 21, 1914. 
 
"I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, 
 my brothers ! I bow to you all and take 
 my departure. Here I give back the keys 
 of my door — and I give up all claims to 
 my house. I only ask for last kind words 
 from you. We were neighbours for long, 
 but I received more than I could give. 
 Now the day has dawned and the lamp 
 that lit my dark corner is out. A summons 
 has come and I am ready for my journey." 
 
 From " Gitanjali," by Rabindranath Tagore 
 (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1913). 
 
We are indebted to Mr Guy Harrison for the 
 bibliography of Ernest Dowson's works. 
 
A BIBLIOGRAPHY^ OF THE 
 WORKS OF ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 POETRY 
 
 1889 
 
 Temple Bar. (With which is incorporated 
 Benthys Miscellany y) A Magazine for Town 
 and Country Readers. 8vo. Vol. Ixxxv. 
 Richard Bentley & Son. London, 1889. 
 
 [Part 341 of the above, for April, 1889, contains at p. 514 
 a poem intituled " My Lady April," and signed " Ernest 
 Dowson."] 
 
 1891 
 
 The Century Guild Hobby Horse. Illus- 
 trated. (Edited — vols. i. and ii. by A. H. 
 Mackmurdo and H. P. HoRNE ; vols, iii.-vi. 
 by H. P. Horne, and vol. vii. by A. H. 
 Mackmurdo.) 7 vols. 4to. London, 
 1 886- 1 892. 
 
 [Vol. vi. (1891) of the above contains the following poems, 
 signed " Ernest Dowson " : — 
 
 "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae" 
 (p. 67). 
 
 ^ Only the date oifirst publication is given. 
 
132 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 " In praise of solitude : Fleur de la lune" (p. 136). 
 "The Carmelite Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration" 
 
 (pp. 136-137). 
 "Amor Umbratilis" (pp. 137-138).] 
 
 1892 
 
 The Book of the Rhymers' Club. (Only 
 350 copies issued.) Roy. i6mo, pp. xvi + 94. 
 Elkin Mathews. London, 1892. 
 
 [The above includes the following poems by Ernest 
 Dowson : — 
 
 " Carmelite Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration " (pp. 
 
 10,11). 
 " O Mors ! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem 
 
 habenti in substantiis suis" (pp. 30, 31). 
 "Amor Umbratilis" (p. 41). 
 "Ad Domnulam suam" (p. 53). 
 "Vanitas" (pp. 69, 70). 
 " Villanelle of Sunset" (p. 83).] 
 
 1894 
 
 The Second Book of the Rhymers' Club. 
 (Only 500 copies issued.) Roy. i6mo, pp. 
 xvi-fi36. Elkin Mathews and John Lane. 
 London, 1894. 
 
 [The above includes the following poems by Ernest 
 Dowson : — 
 
 "Extreme Unction" (pp. 6, 7). 
 
 "To One in Bedlam" (p. 35). 
 
 " Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae " 
 
 (pp. 60, 61). 
 "Growth" (p. 83). 
 . "The Garden of Shadow" (p. 105). 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 ^33 
 
 "You would have understood me, had you waited" 
 (pp. 1 20, 121). 
 
 The Rhymers' Club consisted of the 
 
 following : — 
 
 John Davidson ^ 
 
 (1857-1909) 
 
 Ernest Dowson 
 
 . ( 1 867-1900) 
 
 Edwin J. Ellis . 
 
 (18 - ) 
 
 George Arthur Greene 
 
 (1853- ) 
 
 Lionel Johnson 
 
 (1867-1902) 
 
 Arthur Cecil Hillier 
 
 (18 - ) 
 
 Richard Le Gallienne 
 
 (1866- ) 
 
 Victor Plarr . . . . 
 
 (1863- ) 
 
 Ernest Radford 
 
 (1857- ) 
 
 Ernest Rhys 
 
 (1859- ) 
 
 Thomas Wm. Rolleston . 
 
 (1857- ) 
 
 Arthur Symons 
 
 (1865- ) 
 
 John Todhunter 
 
 (1839- ) 
 
 Wm. Butler Yeats 
 
 (1865- ). 
 
 ^ John Davidson, though a member of the club, did not 
 contribute to the books. Besides members, the club had at one 
 time affiliated to itself the following permanent guests : — John 
 Gray, Edward Rose, J. T. Nettleship, Morley Roberts, A. B. 
 Chamberlain, Edward Garnett and William Theodore Peters. 
 These names are from a list in the handwriting of Dr G. A. 
 Greene, who acted as hon. secretary to a club without rules or 
 officers.] 
 
 1896 
 
 Verses. Printed on Japanese vellum, and bound 
 in parchment, with cover design in gold 
 by Aubrey Beardsley. (Only 30 copies 
 so printed — also an ordinary edition of 500 
 copies.) Cr. 8vo, pp. xii-f 57. L. Smithers. 
 London, 1896. 
 
134 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 The Savoy. An Illustrated Quarterly, devoted 
 to literature and art, edited by ARTHUR 
 Symons. 4to. Eight numbers. Jan. -Dec. 
 1896 (all published). Leonard Smithers. 
 London, 1896. 
 
 [The above contains the following poems by Ernest 
 Dowson : — 
 
 " Impenitentia Ultima." No. i (Jan. 1896), p. 131. 
 " Saint-Germain-en-Laye." No. 2 (Apr. 1896), p. 55. 
 " Breton Afternoon." No. 3 (July 1896), p. 40. 
 " Venite Descendamus." No. 4 (Aug. 1896), p. 41. 
 A Song, "All that a man may pray." No. 5 (Sept. 
 
 1896), p. 36. 
 " The Three Witches." No. 6 (Oct. 1896), p. 75- 
 "Epilogue." No. 7 (Nov. 1896), p. 87.] 
 
 1897 
 
 The Pageant. Edited by C. Hazelwood 
 Shannon and J. W. Gleeson White. 
 4to. Henry & Co. London, 1897. 
 
 [Contains at page 232 a poem written by Dowson at 
 Pont-Aven, Finistere, in 1896, intituled: "On a Breton 
 Cemetery."] 
 
 1899 
 
 Decorations. In Verse and Prose. (Printed on 
 hand-made paper, and bound in parchment, 
 with cover design in gold by Aubrey 
 Beardsley. (Limited issue.) Sq. cr. Svo, 
 pp. 50. L. Smithers & Co. London, 1899. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 135 
 
 The Poems of Ernest Dowson. With a 
 Memoir by ARTHUR Symons. Four illustra- 
 tions by Aubrey Beardsley, and a portrait 
 by William Rothenstein. Cr. 8vo, pp. 
 xxxviii+166. John Lane. London, 1905. 
 
 [The above collected edition contains "Verses," "The 
 Pierrot of the Minute" and "Decorations."] 
 
 PROSE 
 
 1888 
 
 Temple Bar. (With which is incorporated 
 Bentley's Miscellany?) A Magazine for Town 
 and Country Readers. 8vo. Vol. Ixxxii. 
 Richard Bentley & Son. London, 1888. 
 
 [Part 326 of the above, for January 1888, contains, at pp. 
 83-98, " Souvenirs of an Egoist," signed " Ernest C Dowson." 
 This was reprinted in "Dilemmas" in 1895.] 
 
 1889 
 
 The Critic. 
 
 London, 1889-18 . 
 
 [The above for 21st September 1889 contains the following 
 by Dowson (unsigned) : — 
 
 "Between the Acts." {The Critic Feuilleton — No. 2.) 
 The Critic for ) 18 , contains : — 
 
 " The Cult of the Child." 
 
 1890 
 
 Macmillan's Magazine. 8vo. Vols. Ixi. & Ixiv. 
 Macmillan & Co. London, 1890-1891. 
 
136 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 [The above for February 1890 contains at pp. 274-281 : 
 "The Diary of a Successful Man"— signed "N.B." 
 ( = Dowson). This was reprinted in "Dilemmas" 
 (1895)- 
 
 1891 
 
 The part for August 1891 contains at pp. 305-314 : 
 
 "The Story of a Violin" — signed "Ernest Dowson.^' 
 This was later reprinted in " Dilemmas '■'- under the 
 title of "An Orchestral Violin."] 
 
 The Century Guild Hobby Horse. (Illus- 
 trated. (Edited — vols. i. and ii. by A. H. 
 Mackmurdo and H. P. Horne ; vols. iii. to 
 vi. by H. P. HoRNE, and vol. vii. by A. H. 
 Mackmurdo.) 7 vols. 4to. London, 1886- 
 1892. 
 
 [Vol. vi. (1891) of the above contains the following, signed 
 " Ernest Dowson " : — 
 
 "A Case of Conscience " (at pp. 2-13).] 
 
 1893 
 
 The Hobby Horse. (Illustrated. A continu- 
 ation of T/ie Century Guild Hobby Horse, 
 edited by H. P. HORNE.) 4to. Three 
 numbers (all published). Elkin Mathews. 
 1 893- 1 894. 
 
 [No. I (1893) of the above contains : — 
 
 "The Statute of Limitations'' (at pp. 2-8.) Reprinted 
 in "Dilemmas" in 1895.] 
 
 Dowson (Ernest) and Arthur Moore. "A 
 Comedy of Masks." A Novel. 3 vols. Crown 
 8vo. Wm. Heineman. London, 1893-4. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 137 
 
 1894 
 
 COUPERUS (Louis Marie Anne). " Majesty." 
 Translated by A. Teixeira DE Mattos 
 and Ernest Dowson. 8vo, pp. 419. 
 T. Fisher Unwin. London, 1894. 
 
 Zola (Emile Edouard Charles Antoine). "La 
 Terre." Translated by ERNEST DowsON. 
 Printed by the Lutetian Society, for private 
 distribution. Svo. London, 1894. 
 
 The Yellow Book. An Illustrated Quarterly. 
 Edited by HENRY Harland [1861-1905] 
 and Aubrey Beardsley [1862- 1898]. 4to. 
 13 vols. April-July 1894 Elkin Mathews 
 and John Lane; October 1894 to April 1897 
 John Lane. 
 
 [Vol. iii. (Oct. 1894) contains at pp. 93-109, a story by 
 Dowson, intituled, " Apple Blossom in Brittany."] 
 
 1895 
 
 Dilemmas : Stories and Studies in Sentiment. 
 A Case of Conscience. The Diary of a 
 Successful Man. An Orchestral Violin. 
 The Statute of Limitations. Souvenirs of an 
 Egoist. Crown Svo, pp. 139. Elkin Mathews. 
 London, 1895. 
 
 1895-1896 
 
 MUTHER (Richard). "The History of Modern 
 Painting." Translated by Ernest Dowson, 
 G. A. Greene and A. C. Hillier. With over 
 
138 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 1300 portraits and illustrations. Sq. imp. 
 8vo, 3 vols., pp. 2304. Henry & Co. London. 
 I. and II. 1895; ni. 1896. 
 
 1896 
 
 The Savoy. An Illustrated Quarterly, devoted 
 to literature and art, edited by ARTHUR 
 Symons. 4to. Eight numbers. Smithers. 
 London, 1896. 
 
 [The above contains the following prose by Dowson : — 
 " The Eyes of Pride." A Story. No. i (Jan. 1896), pp. 
 
 51-63. 
 " Countess Marie of the Angels." A Story. No. 2 
 
 (April 1896), pp. 173-183. 
 " The Dying of Francis Donne." A Study. No. 4 
 
 (Aug. 1896), pp. 66-74.] 
 
 Balzac (Honore de). " La Fille aux Yeux d'Or " 
 (The Girl with the Golden Eyes). Translated 
 by Ernest Dowson. With 6 Illustrations 
 engraved on wood by CHARLES CONDER. 
 Demy 8vo, pp. vii. + 107. Leonard Smithers. 
 London, 1896. 
 
 [Charles Conder (1868- 1909) was a friend of Dowson. 
 There is an account of him in The Diet, of Nat. Biog.'\ 
 
 1898 
 
 Choderlos de Laclos (Pierre Ambroise 
 Francois). " Les Liaisons Dangereuses : or 
 Letters collected in a Private Society, and 
 published for the Instruction of Others." 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 139 
 
 Translated by ERNEST DOWSON. With 
 15 Illustrations after Monet, Fragonard fils, 
 and Gerard. Privately printed and limited 
 to 350 copies. Demy 8vo. 1898. 
 
 1899 
 
 DowsON (Ernest) and ARTHUR MoORE. " Adrian 
 Rome." A Tale. 8vo, pp. 364. Methuen & 
 Co. London, 1899. 
 
 Dubois (Guillaume, Cardinal Archbishop of 
 Cambrai). " Memoirs of Cardinal Dubois " 
 [by Paul Lacroix]. Translated from the 
 French by Ernest Dowson. Demy 8vo. 
 2 vols., each with frontispiece. L. Smithers 
 & Co. London, 1899. 
 
 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet de). " La 
 Pucelle d'Orleans" ( The Maid of Orleans). 
 An herico-comical poem, in twenty-one 
 cantos. A new and complete translation, 
 corrected and augmented from the earlier 
 translation of W. H. Ireland, and the one 
 attributed to Lady Charleville, with the 
 variants, now for the first time translated, by 
 Ernest Dowson, for the Lutetian Society. 
 Edition limited to 500 copies. 8vo. 2 vols. 
 London, 1899. 
 
140 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 DRAMA 
 
 1897 
 
 The Pierrot of the Minute. A Dramatic 
 Phantasy, in One Act [in verse]. With frontis- 
 piece, initial letter, vignette, cul-de-lampe 
 and cover design by AUBREY Beardsley. 
 Edition de luxe of 300 copies. 4to, pp. 43. 
 L. Smithers. London, 1897. 
 
 POSTHUMOUS WORKS 
 
 1907 
 
 GONCOURT (Edmond Louis Antoine de) and 
 Goncourt (Jules Alfred de). "The Con- 
 fidantes of a King : the Mistress of Louis 
 XV." Translated by Ernest Dowson. 
 With portraits. 8vo. 2 vols. T. N. Foulis. 
 London and Edinburgh, 1907. 
 
 1908 
 
 " The Story of Beauty and the Beast." The 
 
 complete fairy story, translated from the 
 French by ERNEST DowsON. With 4 plates 
 (in colour) by CHARLES CONDER. Cr. 4to, 
 pp. 118. John Lane. London, 1908. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 141 
 
 REFERENCES 
 
 References to the life, work and friends of 
 Dovvson are to be found in the following : — 
 
 The Academy (London) for November 1907 
 contains an appreciation of Ernest Dowson's 
 personality under the heading : " The Real 
 Ernest Dowson," by his friend, Edgar 
 Jepson. 
 
 The Author [founded and for many years 
 edited by Sir WALTER Besant] for May 
 1900 contains at pp. 265-268 an account of 
 Dowson's last hours by his friend, ROBERT 
 H. Sherard. London. 
 
 Gibson (Frank). "Charles Conder : His Life and 
 Work." With a catalogue of the lithographs 
 and etchings by Campbell Dodgson. With 
 121 Illustrations. 4to, pp. 117. John Lane. 
 London, 1914. 
 
 [The above contains references to Dowson's "The 
 Story of Beauty and the Beast," at pp. 40, 68, 109 ; 
 and to his translation of " La Fille aux Yeux d'Or," 
 at pp. 78 and 109.] 
 
 i^'jACKSON (Holbrook). "The Eighteen Nineties." 
 A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of 
 the Nineteenth Century. With 24 Illustra- 
 tions. 8vo, pp. 368. Grant Richards. 
 London, 1914. 
 
 [References to Dowson at pp. 39, 55, 69, 84, no, 191, 194, 
 and 201.] 
 
142 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 Kennedy (J. M). "English Literature: 1880- 
 1905." 8vo, pp. 340. Stephen Swift. London, 
 1912. 
 
 [References to Dowson at pp. 136, 137, 138, 139 and 140.] 
 
 Murdoch (W. G. Blaikie). " The Renaissance of 
 the Nineties." Sq. i6mo, pp. xiii + 83. Alex. 
 Moring. London, 191 1. 
 
 [Contains some references to Dowson, and gives a critical 
 account of the literature and art of his time.] 
 
 Sherard (Robert Harborough). " Twenty Years 
 in Paris." Being some Recollections of a 
 Literary Life. With 8 Illustrations. 8vo, pp. 
 XV. + 499. Hutchinson. London, 1905. 
 
 [Gives some personal reminiscences of Dowson at pp. 
 397-412 and p. 437.] 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absinthe, i6 
 
 Adelaide, 117, 123 
 
 " Adrian Rome," 123 
 
 Affectations, 27, 31, 93 
 
 " African Farm, An," 42, 
 
 etc. 
 Alexandrines, 26 
 Alsace, 91, 107, 108, 109 
 America and Americans, 21, 
 
 97, 108 
 American literature, 25 
 " Amor Umbratilis," 18, 19, 
 
 119 
 Ancestors, 18 
 Anthology, Greek, 60 
 Arques, 105, 124 
 Artist, whom or what he may 
 
 serve, 55 
 Astrology, 98, 99 
 
 Balzac, 24, 99 
 
 Bantock, Mr Granville, 49, 
 
 64, 65 
 Barlas, John Evelyn, 60 
 Barretts, the, 18 
 Bathe in sea, 100, loi 
 Baudelaire, 24, 120 
 Beardsley, Aubrey, 30, 66, 
 
 79. 119 
 " Bibi la Puree," 124 
 Bilinguals, 24 
 " Bingers," 15, 16 
 Bivouacking, 14 
 Blackboard, 25, 26 
 Book of the Rhymers' Club, 
 
 54, 56, 60 
 
 143 
 
 Book of the Rhymers' Club 
 (Second), 80, 86, 98, 119 
 
 Books, possession of, 74 
 
 Boiilangisme, 22 
 
 Bourgeoisie, etc., 25, 32, 34 
 
 Breton itinerary, 107 
 
 Breton pardon, 107 
 
 Breton peasants and Alsa- 
 tians, 108, 109 
 
 Brittany, 67, 105, 106, etc. 
 
 Browning reading, 83 
 
 Browning, Robert, 18, 83 
 
 Catford, 104 
 
 Century Guild Hobby Horse, 
 
 19, 67, 68 
 Chamfort, 24 
 Change of heart of poet, 49, 
 
 50. 51 
 Chatterton, 9, 82, 104 
 Childhood, 12, 20, 79 
 Chouans, 67, 112, 113 
 Church and stage, 69 
 Colds, severe, 61, 94, 10 1 
 Comedy of Masks, 87, 91, 
 
 92, 93> 94 
 " Comedy Overture," 49, 67 
 Conder, Charles, 105 
 Council, Mr Norreys, 104, 
 
 105, 125 
 Conversation, probable, 12, 
 
 13 
 Conversion of poet, 30, 49 
 
 Cookery of poet, 84 
 
 Costume, 107, 108 
 
 Couples, old school, 73 
 
144 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Crane, Mr Walter, 63, 68, 73 
 Criticism by others, 55, 56 
 " Cult of the Child," 79 
 " Cynara," 19, 57, 119 
 
 Davidson, John, 63 
 
 Death, allusions to, 98, 99, 
 
 no ; announced, 127 
 Decadence, 30, 43, 59, 74 
 " Decorations," 24, 119 
 " Deluge, Apres nous le," 59 
 Destree, Olivier Georges, 68 
 Dickens, Charles, 94 
 Dieppe, visits to, 28, 29, 105, 
 
 124, 125 
 " Dilemmas," 93 
 Dockers' Bill, 32 
 Dockhouse, 32, 36, etc., 94, 
 
 102, 103 
 Dol, III 
 
 " Douzeuc," Monsieur, 112 
 Dowson Club, 82 ; intime, 
 
 9, 125, 126 ; Mrs, 18, 55, 
 
 86, 102 ; myth, 79, 81, 123; 
 
 Rowland, 103 ; Senior, 18, 
 
 33. 34. 39, 40, 86, 102 
 
 Flaubert, Gustave, 25, 107 
 Forest Row, 20, 40, 41 
 French culture, 24, 25, 26 
 French, how spoken, 23, 24 ; 
 
 mania, 22, 23, 25 
 French literature, 24 
 French Revolution, 24, 84 
 Funeral, 127, 128 
 
 Gallicisms, 25 
 
 Galton, Rev. Arthur, 68 
 
 Gambling, 20 
 
 Gautier, Th., 65 
 
 Gems, Polish tradition of, 97 
 
 German commentators, 42, 
 
 etc. 
 German, knowledge of, 71, 
 
 74. 75, 77 
 Gide, M. Andre, 23 
 " Girl with the Golden Eyes," 
 
 99 
 Gray, Father John, 60, 68, 
 
 72, 74 ; Thomas, 31, 86, 87 
 Greek plays, 72, 73 
 Greene, Dr G. A., 21, 56, 60, 
 
 67, 86, 87 
 
 East End adventures, 94 
 Education, 20, 21 
 Edwards, Mr Osman, 119 
 " Eighteen Nineties," 29, 72 
 Emotion, 49, 54 
 English literature, etc., 25, 
 
 74 
 Englishmen sighted, 113, 114 
 Entente Cordiale, 24 
 " Epistolary Paralysis," 86 
 Euston Road, 125, 126 
 
 Financial worries, 29, 102, 
 
 103 
 Fitzroy Street house — visitors 
 
 and genius, 67, 68 
 Flattery, 29 
 
 Handwriting, 32 
 Haslemere visit, 83, etc. 
 Headlam, Rev. Stewart, 68, 
 
 69, 70 
 Health and frames of mind, 
 
 loi, 104, 117, 121, etc., 125, 
 
 126 
 Heine translation, 74, 75 
 HiUier, Mr Arthur Cecil, 54, 
 
 85, 86, 96, 106 
 History, 21 
 
 Hobby Horse, 19, 67, 68 
 Home of Dowsons, visits to, 
 
 40, 41 
 Hoole, Mr Gerald, 103 
 Horace quoted, 88 
 Home, Mr Herbert, 19, 63, 
 
 67, 68, 81, 88, 91, 95 
 
INDEX 
 
 145 
 
 Hot weather, poet on, 84, 85, 
 
 86, 87 
 Humour, 20, 65 
 
 Ignorance and information, 
 
 21. 25, 35, 36, 74 
 Image, Professor, 61, 64, 67, 
 
 68 
 " In Autumn," 62 
 Independent Theatre, 66 
 " In Tempore Senectatis," 69 
 " Informal Epitaph on a 
 
 Young Poet," 128 
 Intoxication, legend of, 14 
 
 " J.," Mr, II 
 
 Jackson, Mr Holbrook, 29, 72 
 
 Jepson, Mr Edgar, 14, 16, 79, 
 
 93. 95. 98, loi, 106, 125, 128 
 Johnson, Lionel, 22, 26, 27, 
 
 30. 55. 56, 59. 63, 64, 66, 
 
 67, 68, 74, 80, 81, 91, loi, 
 
 106, 117, 122 
 Johnson, Dr, 126 
 Journalistic appointments, 78 
 Jubilee of 1887, 84, 85 
 
 Keats, John, 18, 35, 58, 103 
 Kensingtonians, 67, 123 
 Kipling's " Many Inven- 
 tions," 87 
 
 Labour Movement, 33 
 Lady, wonderful old, 74 
 Lamartine, 17 
 " La Terre," 96, 97, 99 
 Latin genius of poet, 18, 59 
 Latin poets, 109 
 Laughter, 66 
 Leas at Folkestone, 100 
 Le Faouet, no, in, 112, 116 
 Le Gallienne, Mr Richard, 63, 
 91 
 
 K 
 
 Letters, charm of his, 9, 31, 
 
 50, 51, 52, 85, 106, 126 
 Letter-writing, 31, 53, 54, 
 
 69. 87 
 Librarianship, 75, 76, 77, 79, 
 
 80, 89 
 Life, interest in, 93, 95, 98, 
 
 100 
 Life of poet in three periods, 
 
 16, 20 
 Literary culture, 24, 25 
 " London on a Gala Day," 84 
 London, Port of, 33 
 Loti, M. Pierre, 13, 24 
 Love affair, 49, 50, 51, 54, 
 
 55. 103 
 Lutetian Society, 97 
 
 Mansueta, 88-90, 92-94 
 
 " Many Inventions," 87 
 
 Meeting with poet, 11 
 
 Milton's glass of water, 14 
 
 Mind, frames of, and health, 
 loi, 104, 117, 121, etc., 
 125, 126 
 
 Mind of poet, 25, 26, 27, 28, 
 29, 42, etc., 49, 53. 54. 55. 
 60, 61, 70, 98 
 
 " Miserables, Les," old gentle- 
 man in, 34 
 
 Misogyny. See Opinions. 
 
 " Missie," 80, 123 
 
 Mob, the, 62, 65, 87 
 
 " Montmartre," " Anatole 
 de," 42, etc. 
 
 Moore, Mr Arthur, 88, 93, 98, 
 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, III, 
 113, 116, 117, 123, 126 
 
 Morris, William, 62, 74 
 
 Mot Juste, 25, 26 
 
 Music, 65, 71 
 
 Names, old family, 90 
 Ne\Mnarch, Mrs Rosa, 49. 64 
 Novels in collaboration, 87, 
 88, 92, 93 
 
146 
 
 INDEX 
 
 " Odd Volumes," 95 
 
 Omdurman, 90 
 
 " On the Birth of a Friend's 
 
 Child," 89 
 Opinions on Annihilation, 
 
 Belief, Devil, Immortality, 
 
 Religion, Woman, etc., etc., 
 
 etc., 43, etc. 
 Originality, 27 
 Oxford of the eighties, 48 
 Oxford period, 17, 20 
 
 Paris, opinion of, 22, 85 ; 
 
 visits to, 104, 105, 117, 123 
 
 Peasantry, spirit of, 108, 109, 
 
 113 
 Periods, three, 16, 20 
 Peters, Theodore, 66, 92 
 Phthisis, 10 1, 103 
 " Pierrot of the Minute," 49, 
 
 64, 66, 67 
 Plarr, Marion, Poem on birth 
 
 of, etc., 88, 117, 122 
 Plato, 13, 48 
 Poems in MS., 19, 98, 99 
 Poet described, 35, 125, 126 ; 
 
 last glimpses of, 125, 126, 
 
 127 
 Poetry, 16, 17, 18, 65, 76, 117; 
 
 debate on, 63 ; of Ernest 
 
 Dowson, 49, 50 ; static 
 
 and " Tapestry," 109 
 Poets and business, 75, 76, 77 
 Politics, 22 
 Pont-Aven, 105, 114, 115, 
 
 116, 117 
 Pope, Alexander, 32, 88 
 Portraits, 20, 21 
 Propertius, 48, 57, 58 
 Prose poems, 24, 120 
 Public School training, 17, 18 
 
 Queen's College, Oxford, 
 
 13, 102, 119 
 " Quid non speremus, aman- 
 
 tes ? ", 98 
 
 Recitation at Rh^nners', 66 
 
 Renan quoted, 47 
 
 Reptile, supposed noxious, 84 
 
 Rescue party, 123, 124 
 
 Reticence, 30, 50 
 
 Reviews, poet on, 71, 92, 94 
 
 Rhymers' Club Meetings, 60, 
 
 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 81, 94, 95 
 Rhys, Ernest, 68, 119 
 Rickett's, Charles, 91 
 Rime Riche, 26 
 Riotous behaviour, 14, 15, 16 
 Rivarol's burglar, 95 
 Roberts, Morley, on rh^'^mers, 
 
 64 
 Rome, converts to Church of, 
 
 30 
 Rothenstein, Mr William, 21, 
 
 68 
 
 Sainte Barbe, III, 112, 116 
 Salons, 73, 74 
 Sandgate visit, 100 
 " Sapientia Lunae," 61 
 Sargent, Mr, 21 
 Sartorial rehabilitation, 125 
 Sayle, Mr Charles, 11, 76, 102 
 Scaer, 107, 112 
 Scapularies, 100 
 Schopenhauer, 47, 48 
 Schreiner, Miss Olive, 42, etc. 
 Science, modern, 21, 63, 74 
 Second Book of Rhymers' 
 
 Club. SeeBook of Rhymers' 
 
 Club. 
 Sedan, 90, 91 
 Self -neglect, 124, 125 
 Senta, 21 
 Severn, 18, 103 
 Sherard, Mr Robert Har- 
 
 borough, 9, 72, 94, 104, 
 
 125, 127 
 Ship, visit to a, 34, 35 
 Ship, playing at, 36 
 Shipowners and dockers, 32, 
 
 33. 34 
 Smith, Mr Samuel, 117 
 
INDEX 
 
 Smithers, Leonard, 99, 117, 
 
 120 
 Stendhal, 24, 43, 47. 48, 49 
 " Strand of Twenty Years 
 
 Ago," 123 
 Stuarts, last of, 22 
 Style, 25 
 " Supreme Unction," 18, 82, 
 
 119 
 Sjnnons, Mr Arthur, 9, 34, 
 
 49, 79 ; on the poet's 
 
 genius, 9 
 
 Mr 
 
 Tables d'Hote, no 
 " Tapestry," 21, 109 
 Teixeira de Mattos, 
 
 Alexander, 72, 96 
 Temperance, wave of, 14, 15 
 Tennyson, death of, etc., 61, 
 
 62 
 " Terre Promise," 70 
 Thorne, Mr Guy, 123, 125 
 Titles, fantastic, 80 
 " To One in Bedlam," 119 
 Tragedy, 103, 104 
 Translation, dif&culties of, 
 
 from French and Latin, 58, 
 
 Translation, work of, 99 
 
 Unfinished 
 66 
 
 147 
 
 Symphony," 
 
 Verlaine, Paul, 22, 81, 95, 
 
 105 
 " Verses," 98, 117, 119 
 Vigils, loi, 102 
 " Vine-leaf and Violet," 80 
 " Visit (The)," 120 
 Voltaire quoted, 123 
 
 Wagner Opera, 27 
 Walton, Mr F W., 42 
 " Waring," 18 
 
 Warr, Prof., and the poet, 
 I, 72, 73 ; Mrs Warr, 72, 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 23, 28, 29, 30, 
 
 64, 68 
 WiUiams, Mr Talcott, 79 
 Wills, W. G., 20, 40 
 
 Yeats, Mr W. B., 63, 66, 68 
 Youth, anxieties of, 76 
 
 Zola, femile, 43, 72; trans- 
 lations of, 96, 97, 98 
 
 THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH 
 
DILEMMAS 
 
 Stories and Studies in Sentiment 
 
 BY 
 
 ERNEST DOWSON 
 
 CONTENTS.— The Diary of a Successful Man 
 — A Case of Conscience — An Orchestral Violin 
 — Souvenirs of an Egoist — The Statute of 
 Limitations 
 
 SOME PRESS OPINIONS 
 
 The Pall Mall says : — " Unquestionably good stories, 
 with a real human interest in them. . . . The book as a 
 whole is a powerful delineation of the almost incredible 
 meannesses to which men and women may be driven by 
 love of self." 
 
 The Daily Chronicle says : — " Mr Dowson embodies 
 with great skill and charm the conception of life as 
 'a series of moments and emotions,' and of certain 
 crises arising therefrom which have an artistic interest 
 of their own largely independent of the longer ' story ' 
 of which they form a part." 
 
 Another Critic says : — " Mr Ernest Dowson has treated 
 these exquisite sensibilities, these fragile delicacies, with 
 a marvellous sympathy, an unerring sureness of touch. 
 Times and again a single violent adjective, a single 
 straining to the forcible, would spoil the whole effect, 
 and the phrase always rings true, the epithet is right. . . . 
 The book is a fine achievement in English prose." 
 
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